Federated Analytics: What Is It, and How Does It Work?
What you need to know about federated analytics, in a few short minutes.
What is federated analytics?
Federated analytics is an approach to user data analysis that does not capture data from individual devices.
The idea has circled for a few years, but Google has introduced federated analytics to a wider audience.
They define it as “Collaborative data science without data collection”.
Where ‘traditional’ data science brings lots of information into one central data lake, federated analytics combines information from distributed datasets without gathering it in one central location.
Federated analytics relates to federated learning (clue’s in the name there), but it doesn’t do the learning part (again, see the name).
Federated learning (introduced in 2017) is a way to train centralised machine learning models on decentralised data.
That is to say, Google (or similar) can make its algorithms smarter by aggregating device data (we’ll explain…
