Title: COLA: Decentralized Linear Learning,
Abstract: Decentralized machine learning is a promising emerging paradigm in view of
global challenges of data ownership and privacy. We consider learning of linear
classification and regression models, in the setting where the training data is
decentralized over many user devices, and the learning algorithm must run
on-device, on an arbitrary communication network, without a central
coordinator. We propose COLA, a new decentralized training algorithm with
strong theoretical guarantees and superior practical performance. Our framework
overcomes many limitations of existing methods, and achieves communication
efficiency, scalability, elasticity as well as resilience to changes in data
and participating devices.