PA-CFL: Privacy-Adaptive Clustered Federated Learning for Transformer-Based Sales Forecasting on Heterogeneous Retail Data
Abstract
Privacy-Adaptive Clustered Federated Learning (PA-CFL) enhances federated learning for demand forecasting by clustering retailers into distinct groups, using Transformer models for local predictions, and incorporating differential privacy to handle heterogeneous data and improve robustness.
Federated learning (FL) enables retailers to share model parameters for demand forecasting while maintaining privacy. However, heterogeneous data across diverse regions, driven by factors such as varying consumer behavior, poses challenges to the effectiveness of federated learning. To tackle this challenge, we propose Privacy-Adaptive Clustered Federated Learning (PA-CFL) tailored for demand forecasting on heterogeneous retail data. By leveraging differential privacy and feature importance distribution, PA-CFL groups retailers into distinct ``bubbles'', each forming its own federated learning system to effectively isolate data heterogeneity. Within each bubble, Transformer models are designed to predict local sales for each client. Our experiments demonstrate that PA-CFL significantly surpasses FedAvg and outperforms local learning in demand forecasting performance across all participating clients. Compared to local learning, PA-CFL achieves a 5.4% improvement in R^2, a 69% reduction in RMSE, and a 45% decrease in MAE. Our approach enables effective FL through adaptive adjustments to diverse noise levels and the range of clients participating in each bubble. By grouping participants and proactively filtering out high-risk clients, PA-CFL mitigates potential threats to the FL system. The findings demonstrate PA-CFL's ability to enhance federated learning in time series prediction tasks with heterogeneous data, achieving a balance between forecasting accuracy and privacy preservation in retail applications. Additionally, PA-CFL's capability to detect and neutralize poisoned data from clients enhances the system's robustness and reliability.
Community
PA-CFL: Privacy-Adaptive Clustered Federated Learning for Transformer-Based Sales Forecasting
๐ป Github: https://github.com/Yunbo-max/PA-CFL
๐ Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12220
PA-CFL (Privacy-Adaptive Clustered Federated Learning) is a federated learning framework for demand forecasting in retail environments with heterogeneous data. It groups retailers into privacy-aware clusters ("bubbles") using differential privacy and feature importance, then trains Transformer models for localized sales prediction.
Key Features
- Heterogeneity-Aware Clustering: Groups retailers by feature importance to isolate data discrepancies
- Adaptive Differential Privacy: Dynamically adjusts noise levels per cluster
- Poisoning Defense: Filters malicious clients via risk assessment
- Transformer-Based Forecasting: Self-attention models for accurate predictions
Installation&Usage
git clone https://github.com/your-repo/PA-CFL.git
cd PA-CFL
pip install -r requirements.txt
bash PA-CFL/Model_training/original/run.sh
Citation
@article
{long2025bubble,
title={PA-CFL: Privacy-Adaptive Clustered Federated Learning for Transformer-Based Sales Forecasting on Heterogeneous Retail Data},
author={Long, Yunbo and Xu, Liming and Zheng, Ge and Brintrup, Alexandra},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.12220},
year={2025}
}
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