Federated Learning-based neural networks for airline passenger satisfaction prediction

Abstract

Preserving user data privacy is paramount for airlines. However, achieving highly accurate predictions of passenger satisfaction while safeguarding the privacy of individual companys data remains a considerable challenge. To achieve this objective, we utilized a privacy-preserving machine learning technique known as Federated Learning (FL). FL allows model training on decentralized devices while ensuring data security and privacy. The FL process comprises client training processes, communication rounds, and weight aggregation. We simulate FL principles using multiple processes to enable distributed learning. Clients preprocess data and train local models, ensuring data privacy. Communication rounds involve clients downloading the global model, local training, and transmitting updates to a central server. Weight aggregation methods like Federated Averaging merge these updates, preserving data privacy. Additionally, we leverage Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) as foundational techniques. ANNs consist of input, hidden, and output layers, with weight adjustments based on real value differences to achieve accuracy. Our approach combines FL with ANNs to demonstrate FLs potential in privacy-preserving predictive analytics. We use the Airline Passenger Satisfaction dataset for modeling and evaluate the impact of neural network depth and submodel quantity on prediction accuracy. Our experimental results reveal that neither the depth of neural networks nor the number of submodels significantly affects prediction accuracy. FL emerges as a promising approach to balance data privacy and prediction accuracy effectively.