A smart privacy-preserving learning method by fake gradients to protect users items in recommender systems (Q2228145)

Summary: In this paper, we study the problem of protecting privacy in recommender systems. We focus on protecting the items rated by users and propose a novel privacy-preserving matrix factorization algorithm. In our algorithm, the user will submit a fake gradient to make the central server not able to distinguish which items are selected by the user. We make the Kullback-Leibler distance between the real and fake gradient distributions to be small thus hard to be distinguished. Using theories and experiments, we show that our algorithm can be reduced to a time-delay SGD, which can be proved to have a good convergence so that the accuracy will not decline. Our algorithm achieves a good tradeoff between the privacy and accuracy.