Differentially Private Matrix Factorization

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 privacypreserving 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.