Title: One-Shot Weighted Ensemble Estimation for Federated Quantile Regression: Optimal Statistical Guarantees under Heterogeneous Structured Data
Primary area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
Keywords: Federated learning; quantile regression; heterogeneous structured data

Abstract: Federated Quantile Regression (FQR) has emerged as a powerful modelling paradigm for estimating conditional quantiles, offering a more comprehensive understanding of response distributions than standard conditional mean regression. However, achieving communication efficiency and optimal statistical guarantees for FQR remains challenging, particularly due to the nonsmooth nature of quantile loss functions and the presence of heterogeneously structured data, where each local agent trains its conditional quantile models with distinct sets of features. In this paper, we propose a data-driven, one-shot weighted ensemble estimator for FQR that incorporates scalable weighting schemes to effectively leverage the partially observed features at each local agent, thereby enjoying both communication efficiency and estimation optimality. Theoretically, we present a unified analysis of the proposed learning procedure, establishing that the resulting estimator exhibits asymptotic normality and attains uniformly minimum variance. Furthermore, we investigate the estimator's sensitivity to perturbations introduced by local agents and derive conditions under which the estimator achieves stability and enjoys strong out-of-sample generalization. Extensive simulations under various scenarios validate the asymptotic normality of our estimator and demonstrate its superior estimation accuracy and uniform convergence compared to several baseline methods across a range of quantile levels.