Recommender systems emerged in the mid '90s with the objective of helping users select items or products most suited for them. Whether it is Facebook recommending people you might know, Spotify recommending songs you might like or Youtube recommending videos you might want to watch, recommender systems can now be found in every corner of the internet. In order to handle the immense increase of data online, the development of sophisticated recommender systems is crucial for filtering out information, enhancing web services by tailoring them according to the preferences of the user. This thesis aims to improve the accuracy of recommendations produced by a classical collaborative filtering recommender system by utilizing temporal properties, more precisely the date on which an item was rated by a user. Three different time-weighted implementations are presented and evaluated: time-weighted prediction approach, time-weighted similarity approach and our proposed approach, weighting the mean rating of a user on time. The different approaches are evaluated using the well known MovieLens 100k dataset. Results show that it is possible to slightly increase the accuracy of recommendations by utilizing temporal properties.

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In this thesis a number of models for recommender systems are explored, all using collaborative filtering to produce their recommendations. Extra focus is put on two models: Matrix Factorization, which is a linear model and Multi-Layer Perceptron, which is a non-linear model. With an additional purpose of training the models without collecting any sensitive data from the users, both models were implemented with a learning technique that does not require the server's knowledge of the users' data, called federated learning. The federated version of Matrix Factorization is already well-researched, and has proven not to protect the users' data at all; the data is derivable from the information that the users communicate to the server that is necessary for the learning of the model. However, on the federated Multi-Layer Perceptron model, no research could be found. In this thesis, such a model is therefore designed and presented. Arguments are put forth in support of the privacy preservability of the model, along with a proof of the user data not being analytically derivable for the central server.    In addition, new ways to further put the protection of the users' data on the test are discussed. All models are evaluated on two different data sets. The first data set contains data on ratings of movies and is called MovieLens 1M. The second is a data set that consists of anonymized fund transactions, provided by the Swedish bank SEB for this thesis. Test results suggest that the federated versions of the models can achieve similar recommendation performance as their non-federated counterparts.