Research Article

Explainable Federated Learning Model for Cross-Institutional Digital Financial Data Collaboration and Risk Control

DOI:

10.3791/69805

March 3rd, 2026

In This Article

Summary

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We demonstrate a reproducible protocol for implementing FedRisk, an explainable federated learning framework. The procedure includes semantic data harmonization, privacy-preserving entity alignment, differential privacy calibration, local GBDT training, global Transformer fusion, and gradient-compressed asynchronous updates, enabling secure, scalable, and regulation-compliant financial risk prediction across multiple institutions.

Abstract

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The fragmentation of financial data across institutions and stringent privacy regulations severely hinder collaborative risk management, leading to suboptimal fraud detection with accuracy below 60% and high SME loan default errors exceeding 25%. Existing federated learning solutions face challenges with Non-IID data, model interpretability, and compliance, resulting in real-world adoption rates below 20%. To address these gaps, we propose FedRisk, an explainable federated learning framework integrating four key innovations. First, a cross-institutional data mesh with ontological semantic harmonization achieves feature utilization above 85%. Second, a hybrid AI model combines locally interpretable GBDT with monotonic constraints and a global attention-based Transformer, reducing performance loss in Non-IID scenarios by 7.6% compared to FedAvg. Third, a tripartite privacy mechanism employs adaptive differential privacy with a total budget of ε=5, additive secret sharing, and fairness-aware regularization, limiting group prediction bias below 0.05 and RAROC loss under 2.1%. Fourth, communication-efficient optimizations reduce per-round bandwidth to 8.5 MB and training time to 85 min. Evaluated on over 5 million multi-institutional records, FedRisk achieves an AUC-ROC of 0.912, only 1.8% lower than centralized GBDT, while resisting membership inference attacks with an AUC of 0.58. It reduces cross-institutional data transmission by 99% and outperforms classic FL baselines by 7.3% in AUC-ROC. By enabling secure, transparent, and regulation-compliant risk prediction without raw data sharing, FedRisk provides a scalable solution for cross-institutional financial collaboration.

Introduction

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The in-depth development of digital finance is reshaping service models, from personal credit risk control to SME supply chain financing, establishing data as a core production factor. According to the PBOC's "2023 China Fintech Development Report", by late 2023, China's digital credit scale exceeded 65 trillion yuan, accounting for 38% of the total balance, with daily transaction data surpassing 500TB1. However, "data silos" remain a significant barrier. Institutions generally adopt closed data models due to competition and security concerns. For instance, in credit card fraud detection, banks relying solely on internal data miss critical cros....

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Protocol

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System architecture

Cross-institutional data mesh and semantic layer

To address cross-institutional data heterogeneity, the research constructs a Data Mesh architecture through domain-driven node partitioning. Each financial institution operates as an independent data domain node while maintaining ownership and control rights, with the semantic layer enabling unified data comprehension and interaction. The ontology-based semantic layer establishes a unified financial risk control data model, defining core entities ,fmap attributes, and entity relationships. Specific se....

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Results

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Predictive performance: Approaching the level of centralized models in Non-IID scenarios

In real-world scenarios with highly Non-IID data (institutional default rate variations of 0.2%-3.5%), FedRisk demonstrates exceptional risk differentiation capabilities, as shown in Table 12. Its AUC-ROC reaches 0.912, PR-AUC is 0.823, Brier score 0.042, and false positive rate (FPR) 1.02%. These metrics not only meet the core requirements of financial risk control-low fa.......

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Discussion

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The dynamic hyperparameter tuning strategy, particularly the cosine annealing learning rate scheduler, proved essential for balancing convergence speed and model stability. By decaying the learning rate from 0.05 to 0.00025 over 100 epochs, this approach accelerated early-stage convergence while minimizing late-stage volatility-reducing training time by 37% and improving validation AUC-ROC by 2.3% compared to fixed-rate schedules. Equally critical was the adaptive noise calibration in differential privacy, where variance.......

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Disclosures

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The authors have nothing to disclose.

Materials

List of materials used in this article
NameCompanyCatalog NumberComments
Laptop ComputerDell TechnologiesN/AUsed for data processing and documentation
Statistical Software (SPSS)IBM Corp.Version 26.0Used for statistical analysis
Microsoft ExcelMicrosoftOffice 365Data entry and basic data handling

References

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  1. 2023 risk monitoring report. , China banking and insurance regulatory commission. https://www.cbirc.gov.cn (2023).
  2. Zhang, X., Mavromatis, A., Vafeas, A., Nejabati, R., Simeonidou, D. Federated feature selection for horizontal federated learning in IoT networks. IEEE Internet Things J. 10 (11), 10095-10112 (2023).
  3. Liu, Y., et al.

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Tags

Federated LearningExplainable AICross Institutional CollaborationFinancial Risk ControlData PrivacyNon IID DataModel InterpretabilityDifferential PrivacyFraud DetectionSME Loan Default

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