Knowledge Discovery in Heterogeneous Federated Learning: Encoded Multimodal Features for Depression Prediction
Keywords:
Knowledge discovery, Federated learning, encoded feature, artificial intelligence, depressionAbstract
Depression is a prevalent and serious condition; however, developing reliable knowledge discovery models for early detection remains a significant challenge. Two major barriers hinder progress: (1) stringent privacy regulations that restrict sharing of patient data across institutions, and (2) substantial variability in how hospitals record clinical information—both in content and format. As a result, most research relies on single-institution datasets, which limits the generalizability of the discovered knowledge to other clinical contexts.
We propose a privacy-preserving federated learning for multi-hospital collaboration that avoids raw data sharing. By converting institutional records into standardized 'feature codes'—compact numerical representations of clinical patterns—our method ensures data utility while safeguarding patient privacy.
We evaluated three heterogeneous depression datasets: workplace-related, sleep/nutrition-related, and socioeconomic-related. Our federated learning model demonstrated superior performance across multiple metrics - achieving 94% accuracy (vs. institutional average 91%), 0.95 AUC (vs. 0.84), and 91 precision (vs. 74) - confirming its viability for privacy-preserving cross-institutional knowledge discovery in healthcare.
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