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.
The problem of successive POI recommendation has received much attention recently @cite_22 @cite_8 @cite_23 @cite_11 . To predict where a user will visit next, we need to consider the relationship between POIs. However, existing private recommendation methods @cite_1 @cite_7 @cite_13 only focus on learning the relationship between users and items. Our research direction is to incorporate the relationship between POIs by adapting the transfer learning approach @cite_18 @cite_12 @cite_16 . Most transfer learning methods in collaborative filtering utilize auxiliary domain data by sharing the latent matrix between two different domain. In our work, we use two domain data from users' check-in history: visiting counts and POI transition patterns. We assume that the POI latent factors can bridge the user-POI and POI-POI relationships. To figure out the POI-POI relationship, we build a POI-POI matrix, which represents global preference transitions between two POIs. After that, in the learning process, users update their profile vector based on the visiting counts which describe user-POI relationship.
@cite_18 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_1 @cite_23 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_12 @cite_11
1502375784 1546409232 2896723315 2072609015 2296635479 2017921654 1994576156 2789607830 193545200 2807855639
Data sparsity is a major problem for collaborative filtering (CF) techniques in recommender systems, especially for new users and items. We observe that, while our target data are sparse for CF systems, related and relatively dense auxiliary data may already exist in some other more mature application domains. In this paper, we address the data sparsity problem in a target domain by transferring knowledge about both users and items from auxiliary data sources. We observe that in different domains the user feedbacks are often heterogeneous such as ratings vs. clicks. Our solution is to integrate both user and item knowledge in auxiliary data sources through a principled matrix-based transfer learning framework that takes into account the data heterogeneity. In particular, we discover the principle coordinates of both users and items in the auxiliary data matrices, and transfer them to the target domain in order to reduce the effect of data sparsity. We describe our method, which is known as coordinate system transfer or CST, and demonstrate its effectiveness in alleviating the data sparsity problem in collaborative filtering. We show that our proposed method can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art solutions for this problem. Personalized point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is a significant task in location-based social networks (LBSNs) as it can help provide better user experience as well as enable third-party services, e.g., launching advertisements. To provide a good recommendation, various research has been conducted in the literature. However, pervious efforts mainly consider the "check-ins" in a whole and omit their temporal relation. They can only recommend POI globally and cannot know where a user would like to go tomorrow or in the next few days. In this paper, we consider the task of successive personalized POI recommendation in LBSNs, which is a much harder task than standard personalized POI recommendation or prediction. To solve this task, we observe two prominent properties in the check-in sequence: personalized Markov chain and region localization. Hence, we propose a novel matrix factorization method, namely FPMC-LR, to embed the personalized Markov chains and the localized regions. Our proposed FPMC-LR not only exploits the personalized Markov chain in the check-in sequence, but also takes into account users' movement constraint, i.e., moving around a localized region. More importantly, utilizing the information of localized regions, we not only reduce the computation cost largely, but also discard the noisy information to boost recommendation. Results on two real-world LBSNs datasets demonstrate the merits of our proposed FPMC-LR. 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. Location-based social networks (LBSNs) offer researchers rich data to study people's online activities and mobility patterns. One important application of such studies is to provide personalized point-of-interest (POI) recommendations to enhance user experience in LBSNs. Previous solutions directly predict users' preference on locations but fail to provide insights about users' preference transitions among locations. In this work, we propose a novel category-aware POI recommendation model, which exploits the transition patterns of users' preference over location categories to improve location recommendation accuracy. Our approach consists of two stages: (1) preference transition (over location categories) prediction, and (2) category-aware POI recommendation. Matrix factorization is employed to predict a user's preference transitions over categories and then her preference on locations in the corresponding categories. Real data based experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art POI recommendation models by at least 39.75 in terms of recall. Matrix factorization (MF) is a prevailing collaborative filtering method for building recommender systems. It requires users to upload their personal preferences to the recommender for performing MF, which raises serious privacy concerns. This paper proposes a differentially private MF mechanism that can prevent an untrusted recommender from learning any users' ratings or profiles. Our design decouples computations upon users' private data from the recommender to users, and makes the recommender aggregate local results in a privacy-preserving way. It uses the objective perturbation to make sure that the final item profiles satisfy differential privacy and solves the challenge to decompose the noise component for objective perturbation into small pieces that can be determined locally and independently by users. We also propose a third-party based mechanism to reduce noises added in each iteration and adapt our online algorithm to the dynamic setting that allows users to leave and join. The experiments show that our proposal is efficient and introduces acceptable side effects on the precision of results. Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has become an important means to help people discover attractive locations. However, extreme sparsity of user-POI matrices creates a severe challenge. To cope with this challenge, viewing mobility records on location-based social networks (LBSNs) as implicit feedback for POI recommendation, we first propose to exploit weighted matrix factorization for this task since it usually serves collaborative filtering with implicit feedback better. Besides, researchers have recently discovered a spatial clustering phenomenon in human mobility behavior on the LBSNs, i.e., individual visiting locations tend to cluster together, and also demonstrated its effectiveness in POI recommendation, thus we incorporate it into the factorization model. Particularly, we augment users' and POIs' latent factors in the factorization model with activity area vectors of users and influence area vectors of POIs, respectively. Based on such an augmented model, we not only capture the spatial clustering phenomenon in terms of two-dimensional kernel density estimation, but we also explain why the introduction of such a phenomenon into matrix factorization helps to deal with the challenge from matrix sparsity. We then evaluate the proposed algorithm on a large-scale LBSN dataset. The results indicate that weighted matrix factorization is superior to other forms of factorization models and that incorporating the spatial clustering phenomenon into matrix factorization improves recommendation performance. A major challenge for collaborative filtering (CF) techniques in recommender systems is the data sparsity that is caused by missing and noisy ratings. This problem is even more serious for CF domains where the ratings are expressed numerically, e.g. as 5-star grades. We assume the 5-star ratings are unordered bins instead of ordinal relative preferences. We observe that, while we may lack the information in numerical ratings, we sometimes have additional auxiliary data in the form of binary ratings. This is especially true given that users can easily express themselves with their preferences expressed as likes or dislikes for items. In this paper, we explore how to use these binary auxiliary preference data to help reduce the impact of data sparsity for CF domains expressed in numerical ratings. We solve this problem by transferring the rating knowledge from some auxiliary data source in binary form (that is, likes or dislikes), to a target numerical rating matrix. In particular, our solution is to model both the numerical ratings and ratings expressed as like or dislike in a principled way. We present a novel framework of Transfer by Collective Factorization (TCF), in which we construct a shared latent space collectively and learn the data-dependent effect separately. A major advantage of the TCF approach over the previous bilinear method of collective matrix factorization is that we are able to capture the data-dependent effect when sharing the data-independent knowledge. This allows us to increase the overall quality of knowledge transfer. We present extensive experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of TCF at various sparsity levels, and show improvements of our approach as compared to several state-of-the-art methods. Recommender systems are collecting and analyzing user data to provide better user experience. However, several privacy concerns have been raised when a recommender knows user's set of items or their ratings. A number of solutions have been suggested to improve privacy of legacy recommender systems, but the existing solutions in the literature can protect either items or ratings only. In this paper, we propose a recommender system that protects both user's items and ratings. For this, we develop novel matrix factorization algorithms under local differential privacy (LDP). In a recommender system with LDP, individual users randomize their data themselves to satisfy differential privacy and send the perturbed data to the recommender. Then, the recommender computes aggregates of the perturbed data. This framework ensures that both user's items and ratings remain private from the recommender. However, applying LDP to matrix factorization typically raises utility issues with i) high dimensionality due to a large number of items and ii) iterative estimation algorithms. To tackle these technical challenges, we adopt dimensionality reduction technique and a novel binary mechanism based on sampling. We additionally introduce a factor that stabilizes the perturbed gradients. With MovieLens and LibimSeTi datasets, we evaluate recommendation accuracy of our recommender system and demonstrate that our algorithm performs better than the existing differentially private gradient descent algorithm for matrix factorization under stronger privacy requirements. Data sparsity due to missing ratings is a major challenge for collaborative filtering (CF) techniques in recommender systems. This is especially true for CF domains where the ratings are expressed numerically. We observe that, while we may lack the information in numerical ratings, we may have more data in the form of binary ratings. This is especially true when users can easily express themselves with their likes and dislikes for certain items. In this paper, we explore how to use the binary preference data expressed in the form of like dislike to help reduce the impact of data sparsity of more expressive numerical ratings. We do this by transferring the rating knowledge from some auxiliary data source in binary form (that is, likes or dislikes), to a target numerical rating matrix. Our solution is to model both numerical ratings and like dislike in a principled way, using a novel framework of Transfer by Collective Factorization (TCF). In particular, we construct the shared latent space collectively and learn the data-dependent effect separately. A major advantage of the TCF approach over previous collective matrix factorization (or bifactorization) methods is that we are able to capture the data-dependent effect when sharing the data-independent knowledge, so as to increase the over-all quality of knowledge transfer. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of TCF at various sparsity levels as compared to several state-of-the-art methods.