FedGES: A Federated Learning Approach for Bayesian Network Structure Learning
摘要
Learning the structure of Bayesian Networks (BNs) typically requires centralised access to data, which is often infeasible under privacy or governance constraints. We present Federated Greedy Equivalence Search (FedGES), a federated framework that learns BN structures by exchanging only Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) between clients and a server, never raw data or sufficient statistics. Clients run GES locally with an edge-growth limit, and the server aggregates structures using thresholded consensus fusion or a min-cut-based consensus, iterating until convergence is achieved. With a score-consistent metric, FedGES preserves the theoretical guarantees of centralised GES and ensures finite termination. In experiments on 14 benchmark networks from