Probabilistic Matrix Factorization with Personalized Differential Privacy

Probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF) plays a crucial role in recommendation systems. It requires a large amount of user data (such as user shopping records and movie ratings) to predict personal preferences, and thereby provides users high-quality recommendation services, which expose the risk of leakage of user privacy. Differential privacy, as a provable privacy protection framework, has been applied widely to recommendation systems. It is common that different individuals have different levels of privacy requirements on items. However, traditional differential privacy can only provide a uniform level of privacy protection for all users. In this paper, we mainly propose a probabilistic matrix factorization recommendation scheme with personalized differential privacy (PDP-PMF). It aims to meet users' privacy requirements specified at the item-level instead of giving the same level of privacy guarantees for all. We then develop a modified sampling mechanism (with bounded differential privacy) for achieving PDP. We also perform a theoretical analysis of the PDP-PMF scheme and demonstrate the privacy of the PDP-PMF scheme. In addition, we implement the probabilistic matrix factorization schemes both with traditional and with personalized differential privacy (DP-PMF, PDP-PMF) and compare them through a series of experiments. The results show that the PDP-PMF scheme performs well on protecting the privacy of each user and its recommendation quality is much better than the DP-PMF scheme.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

Successive Point-of-Interest Recommendation with Local Differential Privacy

A point-of-interest (POI) recommendation system plays an important role in location-based services (LBS) because it can help people to explore new locations and promote advertisers to launch ads to target users. Exiting POI recommendation methods need users' raw check-in data, which can raise location privacy breaches. Even worse, several privacy-preserving recommendation systems could not utilize the transition pattern in the human movement. To address these problems, we propose Successive Point-of-Interest REcommendation with Local differential privacy (SPIREL) framework. SPIREL employs two types of sources from users' check-in history: a transition pattern between two POIs and visiting counts of POIs. We propose a novel objective function for learning the user-POI and POI-POI relationships simultaneously. We further propose two privacy-preserving mechanisms to train our recommendation system. Experiments using two public datasets demonstrate that SPIREL achieves better POI recommendation quality while preserving stronger privacy for check-in history.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

Providing reliability in Recommender Systems through Bernoulli Matrix Factorization

Beyond accuracy, quality measures are gaining importance in modern recommender systems, with reliability being one of the most important indicators in the context of collaborative filtering. This paper proposes Bernoulli Matrix Factorization (BeMF), which is a matrix factorization model, to provide both prediction values and reliability values. BeMF is a very innovative approach from several perspectives: a) it acts on model-based collaborative filtering rather than on memory-based filtering, b) it does not use external methods or extended architectures, such as existing solutions, to provide reliability, c) it is based on a classification-based model instead of traditional regression-based models, and d) matrix factorization formalism is supported by the Bernoulli distribution to exploit the binary nature of the designed classification model. The experimental results show that the more reliable a prediction is, the less liable it is to be wrong: recommendation quality improves after the most reliable predictions are selected. State-of-the-art quality measures for reliability have been tested, which shows that BeMF outperforms previous baseline methods and models.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, 8 table