Privacy-Preserving Personalization in Education: A Federated Recommender System for Student Performance Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Tertulino, Rodrigo, Almeida, Ricardo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Tertulino, Rodrigo
Almeida, Ricardo
author_facet Tertulino, Rodrigo
Almeida, Ricardo
contents The increasing digitalization of education presents unprecedented opportunities for data-driven personalization, but it also introduces significant challenges to student data privacy. Conventional recommender systems rely on centralized data, a paradigm often incompatible with modern data protection regulations. A novel privacy-preserving recommender system is proposed and evaluated to address this critical issue using Federated Learning (FL). The approach utilizes a Deep Neural Network (DNN) with rich, engineered features from the large-scale ASSISTments educational dataset. A rigorous comparative analysis of federated aggregation strategies was conducted, identifying FedProx as a significantly more stable and effective method for handling heterogeneous student data than the standard FedAvg baseline. The optimized federated model achieves a high-performance F1-Score of 76.28%, corresponding to 92% of the performance of a powerful, centralized XGBoost model. These findings validate that a federated approach can provide highly effective content recommendations without centralizing sensitive student data. Consequently, our work presents a viable and robust solution to the personalization-privacy dilemma in modern educational platforms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_10516
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Privacy-Preserving Personalization in Education: A Federated Recommender System for Student Performance Prediction
Tertulino, Rodrigo
Almeida, Ricardo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Logic in Computer Science
The increasing digitalization of education presents unprecedented opportunities for data-driven personalization, but it also introduces significant challenges to student data privacy. Conventional recommender systems rely on centralized data, a paradigm often incompatible with modern data protection regulations. A novel privacy-preserving recommender system is proposed and evaluated to address this critical issue using Federated Learning (FL). The approach utilizes a Deep Neural Network (DNN) with rich, engineered features from the large-scale ASSISTments educational dataset. A rigorous comparative analysis of federated aggregation strategies was conducted, identifying FedProx as a significantly more stable and effective method for handling heterogeneous student data than the standard FedAvg baseline. The optimized federated model achieves a high-performance F1-Score of 76.28%, corresponding to 92% of the performance of a powerful, centralized XGBoost model. These findings validate that a federated approach can provide highly effective content recommendations without centralizing sensitive student data. Consequently, our work presents a viable and robust solution to the personalization-privacy dilemma in modern educational platforms.
title Privacy-Preserving Personalization in Education: A Federated Recommender System for Student Performance Prediction
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10516