An improved (k, p, l)-anonymity method for privacy preserving collaborative filtering

Abstract

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a successful technique that has been implemented in recommender systems and Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering (PPCF) aroused increasing concerns of the society. Current solutions mainly focus on cryptographic methods, obfuscation methods, perturbation methods and differential privacy methods. But these methods have some shortcomings, such as unnecessary computational cost, lower data quality and hard to calibrate the magnitude of noise. This paper proposes a (k, p, I)-anonymity method that improves the existing k-anonymity method in PPCF. The method works as follows: First, it applies Latent Factor Model (LFM) to reduce matrix sparsity. Then it improves Maximum Distance to Average Vector (MDAV) microaggregation algorithm based on importance partitioning to increase homogeneity among records in each group which can retain better data quality and (p, I)-diversity model where p is attacker's prior knowledge about users' ratings and I is the diversity among users in each group to improve the level of privacy preserving. Theoretical and experimental analyses show that our approach ensures a higher level of privacy preserving based on lower information loss.