Towards Privacy-preserving Mobile Applications with Federated Learning

Recommender systems have gained prominence in bringing users tailor-made content from the web aiding their decision making process. However, this personalization comes at a cost of privacy of sharing personal information with the recommendation provider. Moreover, with growing sizes of datasets and models, centralized processing of such data has become challenging. To this end, we propose a federated matrix factorization algorithm to enable personal data to be stored and used on-device for training while sending updates to train a centralized model. We illustrate preliminary results from our algorithm applied to recommendation of articles to users of a mobile application based on their reading history. We compare our performance with centralized matrix factorization applied on the same dataset.