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Securing Recommender Systems Against Shilling Attacks Using Social-Based Clustering

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Abstract

Recommender systems (RS) have been found supportive and practical in e-commerce and been established as useful aiding services. Despite their great adoption in the user communities, RS are still vulnerable to unscrupulous producers who try to promote their products by shilling the systems. With the advent of social networks new sources of information have been made available which can potentially render RS more resistant to attacks. In this paper we explore the information provided in the form of social links with clustering for diminishing the impact of attacks. We propose two algorithms, CluTr and WCluTr, to combine clustering with \trust" among users. We demonstrate that CluTr and WCluTr enhance the robustness of RS by experimentally evaluating them on data from a public consumer recommender system Epinions.com.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia

    Xiang-Liang Zhang & Tak Man Desmond Lee

  2. Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Georgios Pitsilis

Authors
  1. Xiang-Liang Zhang
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  2. Tak Man Desmond Lee
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  3. Georgios Pitsilis
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Correspondence to Xiang-Liang Zhang.

Additional information

The preliminary version of the paper was published in the Proceedings of EDB2012.

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Zhang, XL., Lee, T.M.D. & Pitsilis, G. Securing Recommender Systems Against Shilling Attacks Using Social-Based Clustering. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 28, 616–624 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-013-1362-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-013-1362-0

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