Mobile app risk ranking via exclusive sparse coding

Abstract

To improve mobile application (App for short) user experience, it is very important to inform the users about the apps' privacy risk levels. To address the challenge of incorporating the heterogeneous feature indicators (such as app permissions, user review, developers' description and ads library) into the risk ranking model, we formalize the app risk ranking problem as an exclusive sparse coding optimization problem by taking advantage of features from different modalities via the maximization of the feature consistency and enhancement of feature diversity. We propose an efficient iterative re-weighted method to solve the resultant optimization problem, the convergence of which can be rigorously proved. The extensive experiments demonstrate the consistent performance improvement using the real-world mobile application datasets (totally 13786 apps, 37966 descriptions, 10557681 user reviews and 200 ad libraries).