Detecting shilling attacks using hybrid deep learning models

Abstract

Recommendation systems play a significant role in alleviating information overload in the digital world. They provide suggestions to users based on past symmetric activities or behaviors. Being heavily dependent on users’ behavior, they tend to be vulnerable to shilling attacks. Therefore, protecting them from attacks’ effects is highly important. As shilling attacks have features of a large number of ratings and increasing complexity in attack models, deep learning methods become proper alternatives for more accurate attack detections. This paper proposes a hybrid model of two different neural networks, convolutional and recurrent neural networks, to detect shilling attacks efficiently. The proposed deep learning model utilizes the transformed network architecture for undertaking the attributes derived from user-rated profiles. This architecture enables modeling of the temporal and spatial information in the recommendation system’s ratings. The hybrid model overcomes the limitations of the existing shilling attack deeplearning methods to enhance the recommendation systems’ efficiency and robustness. Experimental results show that the hybrid model results in better predictions on the Movie-Lens 100 K and Netflix datasets by accurately detecting most of the obfuscated attacks compared to the state-of-art deep learning algorithms used for investigation.