Secure Recommender System based on Neural Collaborative Filtering and Federated Learning

Abstract

A recommender system aims to suggest the most relevant items to users based on their personal data. However, data privacy is a growing concern for anyone. Secure recommender system is a research direction to preserve user privacy while maintaining as high performance as possible. The most recent strategy is to use Federated Learning, a machine learning technique for privacy-preserving distributed training. In Federated Learning, a subset of users will be selected for training model using data at local systems, the server will securely aggregate the computing result from local models to generate a global model, finally that model will give recommendations to users. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to train Collaborative Filtering recommender system specialized for the ranking task in Federated Learning setting, where the goal is to protect user interaction information (i.e., implicit feedback). Specifically, with the help of the algorithm, the recommender system will be trained by Neural Collaborative Filtering, one of the state-of-the-art matrix factorization methods and Bayesian Personalized Ranking, the most common pairwise approach. In contrast to existing approaches which protect user privacy by requiring users to download/upload the information associated with all interactions that they can possibly interact with in order to perform training, the algorithm can protect user privacy at low communication cost, where users only need to obtain/transfer the information related to a small number of interactions per training iteration. Above all, through extensive experiments, the algorithm has demonstrated to utilize user data more efficient than the most recent research called FedeRank, while ensuring that user privacy is still preserved.