Behavioral recommendation engine driven by only non-identifiable user data

Abstract

Most recommendation systems utilize personal data to device personalized recommendations for users. Even though it seems favorable, security risks like data breaches are inevitable. This research proposes a novel reinforcement learning ‘approach’ to recommend users without collecting identifiable data. With only user activity on a session, our proposed method can model and track user behavior and formulate a recommendation system. We conclude that our algorithms demonstrate positive results in capturing user behavior without collecting private data of any kind from the user. The research is two folds. On one hand, we experiment using traditional reinforcement learning techniques (MDP, Q-learning), and on the other hand, we use deep reinforcement learning algorithms (DQN, DDQN, and D3QN) on a movie recommendation scenario. Interestingly, we observe that MDP and D3QN works comparatively better on movie recommendations.

Keywords

• Security
• Privacy
• Recommender systems
• Reinforcement learning