Importance-Aware Data Selection and Resource Allocation in Federated Edge Learning System

The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in wireless networks is becoming more and more popular because of the growing number of mobile devices and the availability of huge amount of data. However, directly transmitting data for centralized learning will cause long communication latency owing to the limited communication resource and may incur severe privacy issue as well. To address these issues, we consider the federated edge learning (FEEL) system in this paper and develop an importance-aware joint data selection and resource allocation algorithm to maximize the learning efficiency. Aiming at selecting important data for local training, we first analyze the relation between loss decay and gradient norm, which indicates that larger gradient norm generally leads to faster learning speed. Based on this, a learning efficiency maximization problem is formulated by jointly considering the communication resource allocation and data selection. The closed-form results for optimal communication resource allocation and data selection are both developed, where some insights are also highlighted. Furthermore, an optimal algorithm with low computational complexity is developed to obtain the optimal end-to-end latency in one training period. We show that the sample size should be set to its upper limit in order to maximize the learning performance. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three popular convolutional neural network (CNN) models. The results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the training latency and improve the learning accuracy as compared with some benchmark algorithms.