Consumption prediction with privacy concern: Application and evaluation of Federated Learning

Abstract

In this paper, we propose privacy-friendly electricity consumption prediction models based on Federated Learning (FL). Federated Learning provides a novel framework for Artificial Neural Network training. It decouples data storage from model training from decentralized data sources. A central server does not need to collect raw training data from individual clients but only the model parameters, like the gradients or weights updates. The sensitive raw data can be safely stored and used by end-users themselves. We improve the accuracy of the FL model by first clustering households, and training a personalized model for each cluster. We also analyse the Deep Leakage from Gradients (DLG) attack in our study case with three scenarios. Our simulations suggest that the DLG attack can barely succeed in consumption prediction. In this way, the FL model can guarantee clients’ privacy by design. We use a large-scale dataset that contains 3590 households’ 1.5 years of consumption to test the FL model’s performance. Several clustering algorithms are tested for the following experiments. To comprehensively test the FL model’s performance, we propose several popular neural network models: the simple Deep Neural Network, Long Short-Term Memory, Convolutional Neural Network, and WaveNet. These models are both trained under the centralized and federated framework. The federated trained models slightly sacrifice the model’s accuracy while guaranteeing the client’s data privacy. Meanwhile, the federated model shows remarkable scalability. Under the FL framework, new clients can obtain their prediction 6 times faster. Moreover, the federated model has strong robustness against missing or damaged training data. With a certain percentage of missing data in the training set, the centralized model’s accuracy gets 27% worse, while the federated model’s accuracy only gets 2% worse.