Objective

  • Leveraging cross-domain dataset to overcome the cold-start and data sparsity problem, which is common in POI (point of interests) recommendation problems
  • Protecting user privacy while preserving utility of data from the auxiliary domain

Challenges

  • No existing privacy protection model for cross-domain recommender system
  • Decoding obfuscated data to improve the accuracy of recommendation requires novel decoding algorithm designs

Solutions

  • Generalized a powerful location-privacy preserving model, ​geo-indistinguishability, to restrict obfuscation within the same category of locations.
  • Calculated a confidence score for each obfuscated interaction to reflect on what scale the collective matrix factorization (CMF) trusts each record.

Publication

Accepted by IMWUT 2019 as a full paper [link].