aiqbench analysis
This paper introduces SynPre-FL, a novel framework that integrates high-fidelity synthetic EHR generation via latent diffusion models into federated learning pipelines. By using these synthetic cohorts to warm-start training, the approach effectively mitigates data scarcity and enhances model robustness under severe non-IID fragmentation while maintaining privacy against membership-inference attacks. The method demonstrates improved scalability and interpretability for clinical risk prediction without relying on direct cross-client data sharing.
SynPre-FL: Synthetic data-driven pretraining integrated Federated Learning training framework
arXiv:2607.19524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) offers a promising approach to privacy-preserving clinical risk prediction, but its deployment remains limited by restricted data sharing, client heterogeneity, class imbalance, and the lack of realistic tabular electronic health record (EHR) benchmarks. Synthetic data generation may alleviate data scarcity, yet its integration with federated optimisation has received limited systematic study. We propose SynPre-FL, a unified framework combining high-fidelity synthetic EHR generation with synthetic-pretrained FL for robust prediction under non-IID conditions. A latent autoencoder-diffusion model generates privacy-preserving synthetic cohorts, which are used to warm-start federated training. This pretraining is followed by heterogeneity-aware optimisation using class-balanced local objectives, proximal regularisation, and adaptive server aggregation. Post-hoc calibration and federated-safe explainability support reliable and interpretable risk estimates. Experiments show that the synthetic generator preserves univariate, bivariate, and multivariate structure while protecting against membership-inference and reconstruction attacks. The generated data achieve strong downstream utility under TSTR, TRTS, and model-based evaluations. Across federated settings with 5, 10, and 15 heterogeneous clients, SynPre-FL consistently improves robustness and scalability over baseline methods, especially under severe non-IID fragmentation. Calibration improves probability reliability, while SHAP analysis produces stable and clinically coherent feature attributions across federation sizes. SynPre-FL therefore provides a practical and reproducible framework for combining synthetic data with FL to enable privacy-aware, interpretable, and robust clinical prediction from distributed tabular EHR data.
Authors:Akarsh K Nair, Muhammad Arifur Rahman, Nicholas Shopland, Andy Burton, Jun He, Yuan Shen, David Baldwin, Emma O'Dowd, Amna Burzic, Mufti Mahmud, David J. Brown
Abstract:Federated learning (FL) offers a promising approach to privacy-preserving clinical risk prediction, but its deployment remains limited by restricted data sharing, client heterogeneity, class imbalance, and the lack of realistic tabular electronic health record (EHR) benchmarks. Synthetic data generation may alleviate data scarcity, yet its integration with federated optimisation has received limited systematic study. We propose SynPre-FL, a unified framework combining high-fidelity synthetic EHR generation with synthetic-pretrained FL for robust prediction under non-IID conditions. A latent autoencoder-diffusion model generates privacy-preserving synthetic cohorts, which are used to warm-start federated training. This pretraining is followed by heterogeneity-aware optimisation using class-balanced local objectives, proximal regularisation, and adaptive server aggregation. Post-hoc calibration and federated-safe explainability support reliable and interpretable risk estimates. Experiments show that the synthetic generator preserves univariate, bivariate, and multivariate structure while protecting against membership-inference and reconstruction attacks. The generated data achieve strong downstream utility under TSTR, TRTS, and model-based evaluations. Across federated settings with 5, 10, and 15 heterogeneous clients, SynPre-FL consistently improves robustness and scalability over baseline methods, especially under severe non-IID fragmentation. Calibration improves probability reliability, while SHAP analysis produces stable and clinically coherent feature attributions across federation sizes. SynPre-FL therefore provides a practical and reproducible framework for combining synthetic data with FL to enable privacy-aware, interpretable, and robust clinical prediction from distributed tabular EHR data.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
arXiv:2607.19524 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2607.19524v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.19524 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 269 words
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