Distributed Computing and Inference for Big Data

Data are distributed across different sites due to computing facility limitations or data privacy considerations. Conventional centralized methods—those in which all datasets are stored and processed in a central computing facility—are not applicable in practice. Therefore, it has become necessary to develop distributed learning approaches that have good inference or predictive accuracy while remaining free of individual data or obeying policies and regulations to protect privacy. In this article, we introduce the basic idea of distributed learning and conduct a selected review on various distributed learning methods, which are categorized by their statistical accuracy, computational efficiency, heterogeneity, and privacy. This categorization can help evaluate newly proposed methods from different aspects. Moreover, we provide up-to-date descriptions of the existing theoretical results that cover statistical equivalency and computational efficiency under different statistical learning frameworks. Finally, we provide existing software implementations and benchmark datasets, and we discuss future research opportunities. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, Volume 11 is March 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.