845 research outputs found
Dynamic Poisson Factorization
Models for recommender systems use latent factors to explain the preferences
and behaviors of users with respect to a set of items (e.g., movies, books,
academic papers). Typically, the latent factors are assumed to be static and,
given these factors, the observed preferences and behaviors of users are
assumed to be generated without order. These assumptions limit the explorative
and predictive capabilities of such models, since users' interests and item
popularity may evolve over time. To address this, we propose dPF, a dynamic
matrix factorization model based on the recent Poisson factorization model for
recommendations. dPF models the time evolving latent factors with a Kalman
filter and the actions with Poisson distributions. We derive a scalable
variational inference algorithm to infer the latent factors. Finally, we
demonstrate dPF on 10 years of user click data from arXiv.org, one of the
largest repository of scientific papers and a formidable source of information
about the behavior of scientists. Empirically we show performance improvement
over both static and, more recently proposed, dynamic recommendation models. We
also provide a thorough exploration of the inferred posteriors over the latent
variables.Comment: RecSys 201
Recommending with an Agenda: Active Learning of Private Attributes using Matrix Factorization
Recommender systems leverage user demographic information, such as age,
gender, etc., to personalize recommendations and better place their targeted
ads. Oftentimes, users do not volunteer this information due to privacy
concerns, or due to a lack of initiative in filling out their online profiles.
We illustrate a new threat in which a recommender learns private attributes of
users who do not voluntarily disclose them. We design both passive and active
attacks that solicit ratings for strategically selected items, and could thus
be used by a recommender system to pursue this hidden agenda. Our methods are
based on a novel usage of Bayesian matrix factorization in an active learning
setting. Evaluations on multiple datasets illustrate that such attacks are
indeed feasible and use significantly fewer rated items than static inference
methods. Importantly, they succeed without sacrificing the quality of
recommendations to users.Comment: This is the extended version of a paper that appeared in ACM RecSys
201
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