English

On Differentially Private Online Collaborative Recommendation Systems

Cryptography and Security 2015-10-30 v1 Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

In collaborative recommendation systems, privacy may be compromised, as users' opinions are used to generate recommendations for others. In this paper, we consider an online collaborative recommendation system, and we measure users' privacy in terms of the standard differential privacy. We give the first quantitative analysis of the trade-offs between recommendation quality and users' privacy in such a system by showing a lower bound on the best achievable privacy for any non-trivial algorithm, and proposing a near-optimal algorithm. From our results, we find that there is actually little trade-off between recommendation quality and privacy for any non-trivial algorithm. Our results also identify the key parameters that determine the best achievable privacy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1510.08546,
  title  = {On Differentially Private Online Collaborative Recommendation Systems},
  author = {Seth Gilbert and Xiao Liu and Haifeng Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.08546},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

35 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:31:42.359Z