Cafe: Improved Federated Data Imputation by Leveraging Missing Data Heterogeneity

Authors

Language

English

Publication Date

5-1-2025

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

DOI

10.1109/TKDE.2025.3537403

PMID

40322292

PMCID

PMC12048026

PubMedCentral® Posted Date

5-1-2026

PubMedCentral® Full Text Version

Author MSS

Abstract

Federated learning (FL), a decentralized machine learning approach, offers great performance while alleviating autonomy and confidentiality concerns. Despite FL's popularity, how to deal with missing values in a federated manner is not well understood. In this work, we initiate a study of federated imputation of missing values, particularly in complex scenarios, where missing data heterogeneity exists and the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches for federated imputation suffer from significant loss in imputation quality. We propose Cafe, a personalized FL approach for missing data imputation. Cafe is inspired from the observation that heterogeneity can induce differences in observable and missing data distribution across clients, and that these differences can be leveraged to improve the imputation quality. Cafe computes personalized weights that are automatically calibrated for the level of heterogeneity, which can remain unknown, to develop personalized imputation models for each client. An extensive empirical evaluation over a variety of settings demonstrates that Cafe matches the performance of SOTA baselines in homogeneous settings while significantly outperforming the baselines in heterogeneous settings.

Keywords

Federated Learning, Missing Data Imputation, Data Quality, Data Heterogeneity

Published Open-Access

yes

Recommended Citation

, "Cafe: Improved Federated Data Imputation by Leveraging Missing Data Heterogeneity" (2025). Faculty, Staff and Student Publications. 931.
https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/uthshis_docs/931