Exploiting Unlabeled Data in Smart Cities using Federated Edge Learning

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Privacy concerns are considered one of the main challenges in smart cities as sharing sensitive data induces threatening problems in people's lives. Federated learning has emerged as an effective technique to avoid privacy infringement as well as increase the utilization of the data. However, there is a scarcity in the amount of labeled data and an abundance of unlabeled data collected in smart cities; hence there is a necessity to utilize semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we present the primary design aspects for enabling federated learning at the edge networks taking into account the problem of unlabeled data. We propose a semi-supervised federated edge learning method called FedSem that exploits unlabeled data in real-time. FedSem algorithm is divided into two phases. The first phase trains a global model using only the labeled data. In the second phase, Fedsem injects unlabeled data into the learning process using the pseudo labeling technique and the model developed in the first phase to improve the learning performance. We carried out several experiments using the traffic signs dataset as a case study. Our results show that FedSem can achieve accuracy by up to 8% by utilizing the unlabeled data in the learning process.