FedEgo: Privacy-preserving Personalized Federated Graph Learning with Ego-graphs

Abstract

As special information carriers containing both structure and feature information, graphs are widely used in graph mining, e.g., Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, graph data are stored separately in multiple distributed parties in some practical scenarios, which may not be directly shared due to conflicts of interest. Hence, federated graph neural networks are proposed to address such data silo issues while preserving each party’s privacy (or client). Nevertheless, different graph data distributions of various parties, which is known as the statistical heterogeneity, may degrade the performance of naive federated learning algorithms like FedAvg. In this article, we propose FedEgo, a federated graph learning framework based on ego-graphs to tackle the challenges above, in which each client will train their local models while also contributing to the training of a global model. FedEgo applies GraphSAGE over ego-graphs to make full use of the structure information and utilizes Mixup for privacy concerns. To deal with the statistical heterogeneity, we integrate personalization into learning and propose an adaptive mixing coefficient strategy that enables clients to achieve their optimal personalization. Extensive experimental results and in-depth analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of FedEgo.