Mid Sweden University

The objective of this thesis was to investigate how the addition of a privacy-preserving mechanism to a federated learning model was affecting the performance of the model for an image classification task. Further, it was to get knowledge on how the outlook to use federated learning in the biotech industry is and what possible threats and attacks that could obstruct the utilization of federated learning among competitors. In the project four different aggregation algorithms for federated learning were examined. The methods were weighted fedAvg, unweighted FedAvg, weighted FedProx and unweighted FedProx. The experiment was using tensorflow federated to simulate the different methods. They were evaluated using accuracy, loss, recall, precision and F1 score. The result of this study shows that the performance of the deep neural network model is decreasing as differential privacy is introduced to the process. Out of the four aggregation algorithms used, weighted fedProx was the one that performed the best despite the added noise. It was also concluded that federated learning has potential to be used in the biotechnology industry among competitors, but that there are still security threats and attacks to avoid.