Robust Collaborative Recommendation

  • Robin Burke
  • Michael P. O’Mahony
  • Neil J. Hurley

Abstract

Collaborative recommender systems are vulnerable to malicious users who seek to bias their output, causing them to recommend (or not recommend) particular items. This problem has been an active research topic since 2002. Researchers have found that the most widely-studied memory-based algorithms have significant vulnerabilities to attacks that can be fairly easily mounted. This chapter discusses these findings and the responses that have been investigated, especially detection of attack profiles and the implementation of robust recommendation algorithms.

Keywords

Recommender System Target Item Recommendation Algorithm Filler Item Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for some helpful suggestions. O’Mahony and Hurley are supported by Science Foundation Ireland under Grant Number SFI/12/RC/2289.

References

  1. 1.
    A.Williams, C., Mobasher, B., Burke, R.: Defending recommender systems: detection of profile injection attacks. Service Oriented Computing and Applications pp. 157–170 (2007)Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Bilge, A., Gunes, I., Polat, H.: Robustness analysis of privacy-preserving model-based recommendation schemes. Expert Systems with Applications 41(8), 3671–3681 (2014). DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2013.11.039. URL http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417413009597
  3. 3.
    Breese, J.S., Heckerman, D., Kadie, C.: Empirical analysis of predictive algorithms for collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence pp. 43–52 (1998)Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    Bryan, K., O’Mahony, M., Cunningham, P.: Unsupervised retrieval of attack profiles in collaborative recommender systems. In: RecSys ’08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Recommender systems, pp. 155–162. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2008). DOI http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1454008.1454034
  5. 5.
    Burke, R., Mobasher, B., Bhaumik, R.: Limited knowledge shilling attacks in collaborative filtering systems. In Proceedings of Workshop on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization (ITWP’05) (2005)Google Scholar
  6. 6.
    Burke, R., Mobasher, B., Williams, C.: Classification features for attack detection in collaborative recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 17–20 (2006)Google Scholar
  7. 7.
    Burke, R., Mobasher, B., Zabicki, R., Bhaumik, R.: Identifying attack models for secure recommendation. In: Beyond Personalization: A Workshop on the Next Generation of Recommender Systems (2005)Google Scholar
  8. 8.
    Cheng, Z., Hurley, N.: Effective diverse and obfuscated attacks on model-based recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, RecSys ’09, pp. 141–148. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2009). DOI  10.1145/1639714.1639739. URL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1639714.1639739
  9. 9.
    Cheng, Z., Hurley, N.: Trading robustness for privacy in decentralized recommender systems. In: IAAI, Proceedings of the Twenty-First Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence. AAAI (2009)Google Scholar
  10. 10.
    Cheng, Z., Hurley, N.: Robust collaborative recommendation by least trimmed squares matrix factorization. In: Proceedings of the 2010 22Nd IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence - Volume 02, ICTAI ’10, pp. 105–112. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA (2010). DOI  10.1109/ICTAI.2010.90. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICTAI.2010.90
  11. 11.
    Chirita, P.A., Nejdl, W., Zamfir, C.: Preventing shilling attacks in online recommender systems. In Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM’2005) pp. 67–74 (2005)Google Scholar
  12. 12.
    Dellarocas, C.: Immunizing on–line reputation reporting systems against unfair ratings and discriminatory behavior. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’00) pp. 150–157 (2000)Google Scholar
  13. 13.
    Domingos, P., Richardson, M.: Mining the network value of customers. In: Proceedings of the Seventh ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD ’01, pp. 57–66. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2001). DOI  10.1145/502512.502525. URL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/502512.502525
  14. 14.
    Herlocker, J., Konstan, J., Borchers, A., Riedl, J.: An algorithmic framework for performing collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval pp. 230–237 (1999)Google Scholar
  15. 15.
    Hofmann, T.: Collaborative filtering via gaussian probabilistic latent semantic analysis. In: SIGIR ’03: Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, pp. 259–266. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2003). DOI http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/860435.860483
  16. 16.
    Huang, S., Shang, M., Cai, S.: A hybrid decision approach to detect profile injection attacks in collaborative recommender systems. In: L. Chen, A. Felfernig, J. Liu, Z. Raś (eds.) Foundations of Intelligent Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 7661, pp. 377–386. Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2012). DOI  10.1007/978-3-642-34624-8_43. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34624-8_43
  17. 17.
    Hurley, N., Cheng, Z., Zhang, M.: Statistical attack detection. In: Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, RecSys ’09, pp. 149–156. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2009). DOI  10.1145/1639714.1639740. URL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1639714.1639740
  18. 18.
    Lam, S.K., Riedl, J.: Shilling recommender systems for fun and profit. In Proceedings of the 13th International World Wide Web Conference pp. 393–402 (2004)Google Scholar
  19. 19.
    Li, C., Luo, Z.: Detection of shilling attacks in collaborative filtering recommender systems. In: A. Abraham, H. Liu, F. Sun, C. Guo, S.F. McLoone, E. Corchado (eds.) SoCPaR, pp. 190–193. IEEE (2011). URL http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/socpar/socpar2011.html#LiL11
  20. 20.
    Macnaughton-Smith, P., Williams, W.T., Dale, M., Mockett, L.: Dissimilarity analysis – a new technique of hierarchical sub–division. Nature 202, 1034–1035 (1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. 21.
    Massa, P., Avesani, P.: Trust-aware recommender systems. In: RecSys ’07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM conference on Recommender systems, pp. 17–24. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2007). DOI http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1297231.1297235
  22. 22.
    Mehta, B., Hofmann, T.: A survey of attack-resistant collaborative filtering algorithms. Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering 31(2), 14–22 (2008). URL http://sites.computer.org/debull/A08June/mehta.pdf
  23. 23.
    Mehta, B., Hofmann, T., Fankhauser, P.: Lies and propaganda: Detecting spam users in collaborative filtering. In: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, pp. 14–21 (2007)Google Scholar
  24. 24.
    Mehta, B., Hofmann, T., Nejdl, W.: Robust collaborative filtering. In: RecSys ’07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM conference on Recommender systems, pp. 49–56. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2007). DOI http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1297231.1297240
  25. 25.
    Mehta, B., Nejdl, W.: Unsupervised strategies for shilling detection and robust collaborative filtering. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 19(1–2), 65–97 (2009). DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11257-008-9050-4 Google Scholar
  26. 26.
    Mobasher, B., Burke, R., Bhaumik, R., Williams, C.: Effective attack models for shilling item-based collaborative filtering system. In Proceedings of the 2005 WebKDD Workshop (KDD’2005) (2005)Google Scholar
  27. 27.
    Mobasher, B., Burke, R., Bhaumik, R., Williams, C.: Toward trustworthy recommender systems: An analysis of attack models and algorithm robustness. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology 7(4) (2007)Google Scholar
  28. 28.
    Mobasher, B., Burke, R.D., Sandvig, J.J.: Model-based collaborative filtering as a defense against profile injection attacks. In: AAAI. AAAI Press (2006)Google Scholar
  29. 29.
    O’Donovan, J., Smyth, B.: Is trust robust?: an analysis of trust-based recommendation. In: IUI ’06: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, pp. 101–108. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2006). DOI http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1111449.1111476
  30. 30.
    O’Mahony, M.P., Hurley, N.J., Silvestre, C.C.M.: An evaluation of neighbourhood formation on the performance of collaborative filtering. Artificial Intelligence Review 21(1), 215–228 (2004)CrossRefMATHGoogle Scholar
  31. 31.
    O’Mahony, M.P., Hurley, N.J., Silvestre, G.C.M.: Promoting recommendations: An attack on collaborative filtering. In: A. Hameurlain, R. Cicchetti, R. Traunmüller (eds.) DEXA, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2453, pp. 494–503. Springer (2002)Google Scholar
  32. 32.
    O’Mahony, M.P., Hurley, N.J., Silvestre, G.C.M.: An evaluation of the performance of collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 14th Irish International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS’03) pp. 164–168 (2003)Google Scholar
  33. 33.
    O’Mahony, M.P., Hurley, N.J., Silvestre, G.C.M.: Recommender systems: Attack types and strategies. In Proceedings of the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05) pp. 334–339 (2005)Google Scholar
  34. 34.
    Rashid, A.M., Karypis, G., Riedl, J.: Influence in ratings-based recommender systems: An algorithm-independent approach. In: Proceedings of the 2005 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, SDM 2005, pp. 556–560. SIAM (2005)Google Scholar
  35. 35.
    Resnick, P., Iacovou, N., Suchak, M., Bergstrom, P., J.Riedl: Grouplens: An open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’94) pp. 175–186 (1994)Google Scholar
  36. 36.
    Resnick, P., Sami, R.: The influence limiter: provably manipulation-resistant recommender systems. In: RecSys ’07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM conference on Recommender systems, pp. 25–32. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2007). DOI http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1297231.1297236
  37. 37.
    Resnick, P., Sami, R.: The information cost of manipulation-resistance in recommender systems. In: RecSys ’08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Recommender systems, pp. 147–154. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2008). DOI http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1454008.1454033
  38. 38.
    Sandvig, J.J., Mobasher, B., Burke, R.: Robustness of collaborative recommendation based on association rule mining. In: RecSys ’07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM conference on Recommender systems, pp. 105–112. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2007). DOI http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1297231.1297249
  39. 39.
    Sarwar, B., Karypis, G., Konstan, J., Riedl, J.: Item–based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms. In Proceedings of the Tenth International World Wide Web Conference pp. 285–295 (2001)Google Scholar
  40. 40.
    Su, X.F., Zeng, H.J., Chen, Z.: Finding group shilling in recommendation system. In: WWW ’05: Special interest tracks and posters of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web, pp. 960–961. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2005). DOI http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1062745.1062818
  41. 41.
    Tang, T., Tang, Y.: An effective recommender attack detection method based on time sfm factors. In: Communication Software and Networks (ICCSN), 2011 IEEE 3rd International Conference on, pp. 78–81 (2011). DOI  10.1109/ICCSN.2011.6013780
  42. 42.
    Williams, C., Mobasher, B., Burke, R., Bhaumik, R., Sandvig, J.: Detection of obfuscated attacks in collaborative recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI’06) (2006)Google Scholar
  43. 43.
    Wilson, D.C., Seminario, C.E.: When power users attack: Assessing impacts in collaborative recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, RecSys ’13, pp. 427–430. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2013). DOI  10.1145/2507157.2507220. URL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2507157.2507220
  44. 44.
    Wu, Z., Wu, J., Cao, J., Tao, D.: Hysad: a semi-supervised hybrid shilling attack detector for trustworthy product recommendation. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, pp. 985–993. ACM (2012)Google Scholar
  45. 45.
    Yan, X., Roy, B.V.: Manipulation-resistnat collaborative filtering systems. In: RecSys ’09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM conference on Recommender systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2009)Google Scholar
  46. 46.
    Zhang, F.G.: Preventing recommendation attack in trust-based recommender systems. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 26(5), 823–828 (2011). DOI  10.1007/s11390-011-0181-4. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11390-011-0181-4
  47. 47.
    Zhang, F.G., Sheng-hua, X.: Analysis of trust-based e-commerce recommender systems under recommendation attacks. In: ISDPE ’07: Proceedings of the The First International Symposium on Data, Privacy, and E-Commerce, pp. 385–390. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA (2007). DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISDPE.2007.55 Google Scholar
  48. 48.
    Zhang, Z., Kulkarni, S.R.: Graph-based detection of shilling attacks in recommender systems. In: Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), 2013 IEEE International Workshop on, pp. 1–6. IEEE (2013)Google Scholar
  49. 49.
    Zheng, S., Jiang, T., Baras, J.S.: A robust collaborative filtering algorithm using ordered logistic regression. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2011, Kyoto, Japan, 5–9 June, 2011, pp. 1–6. IEEE (2011)Google Scholar
  50. 50.
    Zhou, Q., Zhang, F.: A hybrid unsupervised approach for detecting profile injection attacks in collaborative recommender systems. Journal of Information & Computational Science 9(3), 687–694 (2012)Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Robin Burke
    • 1
  • Michael P. O’Mahony
    • 2
  • Neil J. Hurley
    • 2
  1. 1.Center for Web Intelligence, School of Computer Science, Telecommunication and Information SystemsDePaul UniversityChicagoUSA
  2. 2.Insight Centre for Data AnalyticsUniversity College DublinDublinIreland

Personalised recommendations