Detecting shilling profiles in collaborative recommender systems via multidimensional profile temporal features

Abstract

To defend recommender systems, various methods have been proposed to detect shilling profiles, which can be categorised as user- and item-based detection methods. Most of the user-based methods identify shilling profiles via statistical signatures of rating values and suffer from low precision when detecting different types of attacks. Most of the item-based methods use temporal information to detect the anomaly items, but they assume that the fake ratings were injected in short periods. So they are invalid for the long duration and decentralised injection attacks. To address these limitations, the authors extract the multidimensional profile temporal features and present a shilling detection method. First, from the user profile view, user rating behaviours are characterised by corrected conditional entropy and the dissimilarity with the rest-rating model. Second, from the item profile view, the user features are extracted according to item temporal popularity. Third, the features based on weighted deviation from dynamic mean are extracted according to the fact that the items mean changes with time. Finally, support vector machine is exploited to detect shilling profiles based on the proposed features. Experimental results on the Netflix dataset indicate that the performance of the proposed method is better than that of the benchmark methods.