# Measuring the Effects of Non-Identical Data Distribution for Federated Visual Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06335 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06335/

## Key facts

- Cited by 851 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 851)

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## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated Learning enables visual models to be trained in a privacy-preserving way using real-world data from mobile devices. Given their distributed nature, the statistics of the data across these devices is likely to differ significantly. In this work, we look at the effect such non-identical data distributions has on visual classification via Federated Learning. We propose a way to synthesize datasets with a continuous range of identicalness and provide performance measures for the Federated Averaging algorithm. We show that performance degrades as distributions differ more, and propose a mitigation strategy via server momentum. Experiments on CIFAR-10 demonstrate improved classification performance over a range of non-identicalness, with classification accuracy improved from 30.1% to 76.9% in the most skewed settings.