Successive Point-of-Interest Recommendation With Personalized Local Differential Privacy

The fast development of vehicle positioning technologies has paved the way for in-vehicle recommendation systems. Successive Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation, one of the most common forms of in-vehicle recommendation, can help users choose places where they might visit in the future. Generally, to recommend POIs for users, raw check-in data are collected from in-vehicle devices, which raises users’ privacy concerns. To address this problem, we propose a successive POI recommendation framework with local differential privacy. The proposed framework exploits three types of influence factors for recommendation, including geographical influence, temporal influence, and transition pattern between two POIs. To protect users’ check-in data, we propose a distance-weighted location perturbation mechanism that realizes local differential privacy. Considering that different users may have different privacy requirements, we enhance this perturbation mechanism to provide personalized privacy protection. We use the EM reconstruction method to correct the error caused by perturbation on the server side. To improve the accuracy, we design an individual-weighted EM reconstruction method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methods can provide strong privacy protection for users without hurting the recommendation accuracy too much.