Conceptual structure of federated learning research field

Abstract

Nowadays there are a great amount of data that can be used to train artificial intelligent systems for classification, or prediction purposes. Although there are tons of publicly available data, there are also very valuable data that is private, and therefore, it can not be shared without breaking the data protections laws. For example, hospital data has great value, but it involves persons, so we must try to preserve their privacy rights. Furthermore, although it could be interesting to train a model with the data of only one entity (i.e. a hospital), it could have more value to train the model with the data of several entities. But, since the data of each entity might not be shared, it is not possible to train a global model. In that sense, Federated Learning has emerged as a research field that deals with the training of complex models, without the necessity to share data, and therefore, keeping the data private. In this contribution, we present a global conceptual analysis based on co-words networks of the Federated Learning research field. To do that, the field was delimited using an advance query in Web of Science. The corpus contain a total of 2444 documents. As the main result, it should be highlighted that the Federated Learning research field is focused on six main global areas: telecommunications, privacy and security, computer architecture and data modeling, machine learning, and applications.