Research on the Application of Federated Learning Based on CG-WGAN in Gout Staging Prediction

Traditional federated learning frameworks face significant challenges posed by non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data in the healthcare domain, particularly in multi-institutional collaborative gout staging prediction. Differences in patient population characteristics, distributions of clinical indicators, and proportions of disease stages across hospitals lead to inefficient model training, increased category prediction bias, and heightened risks of privacy leakage. In the context of gout staging prediction, these issues result in decreased classification accuracy and recall, especially when dealing with minority classes. To address these challenges, this paper proposes FedCG-WGAN, a federated learning method based on conditional gradient penalization in Wasserstein GAN (CG-WGAN). By incorporating conditional information from gout staging labels and optimizing the gradient penalty mechanism, this method generates high-quality synthetic medical data, effectively mitigating the non-IID problem among clients. Building upon the synthetic data, a federated architecture is further introduced, which replaces traditional parameter aggregation with synthetic data sharing. This enables each client to design personalized prediction models tailored to their local data characteristics, thereby preserving the privacy of original data and avoiding the risk of information leakage caused by reverse engineering of model parameters. Experimental results on a real-world dataset comprising 51,127 medical records demonstrate that the proposed FedCG-WGAN significantly outperforms baseline models, achieving up to a 7.1% improvement in accuracy. Furthermore, by maintaining the composite quality score of the generated data between 0.85 and 0.88, the method achieves a favorable balance between privacy preservation and model utility.