<p>This is certainly a valid application of <code>FedAvg</code> and the variants proposed in the linked paper, though one that is only studied empirically in a subset of the literature. On the other hand, many theoretical analyses of <code>FedAvg</code> assume a similar situation to the one you're describing; at the bottom of page 4 of that linked paper, you will see that the analysis is performed in this so-called 'full participation' regime, where every client participates on every round.</p>
<p>Often the setting you describe is called 'cross silo'; see, e.g., <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04977.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">section 7.5 of Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning</a>, which will also contain many useful pointers for the cross-silo literature.</p>
<p>Finally, depending on the application, consider that it may be more natural to literally train on <em>all</em> clients, reserving portions of each clients' data for validation and test. Questions around natural partitions of data to model the 'setting we care about' are often thorny in the federated setting.</p>
Client participation in the federated computation rounds
<p>I am building a federated learning model using Tensorflow Federated.
Based on what I have read in the tutorials and papers, I understood that the state-of-the-art method (FedAvg) is working by selecting a random subset of clients at each round.</p>
<p>My concern is:</p>
<ul>
<li>I am having a small number of clients. Totally I have 8 clients, I select 6 clients for training and I kept 2 for testing.</li>
<li>All of the data are provided on my local device, so I am using the TFF as the simulation environment.</li>
<li>If I use all of the 6 clients in all of the rounds during federated communication rounds, would this be a wrong execution of the FedAvg method?</li>
<li>Note that I am planning also to use the same experiment used in this <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.00295" rel="nofollow noreferrer">paper</a>. That aims to use different server optimization methods and compare their performance. So, would (all clients participating procedure) works here or not?</li>
</ul>
<p>Thanks in advance</p>