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Detecting Anomalous Ratings Using Matrix Factorization for Recommender Systems

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Web-Age Information Management (WAIM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9659))

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Abstract

Personalization recommendation techniques play a key role in the popular E-commerce services such as Amazon, TripAdvisor and etc. In practice, collaborative filtering recommender systems are highly vulnerable to “shilling” attacks due to its openness. Although attack detection based on such attacks has been extensively researched during the past decade, the studies on these issues have not reached an end. They either extract extra features from user profiles or directly calculate similarity between users to capture concerned attackers. In this paper, we propose a novel detection technique to bypass these hard problems, which combines max-margin matrix factorization with Bayesian nonparametrics and outlier detection. Firstly, mean prediction errors for users and items are calculated by utilizing trained prediction model on test sets. And then we continue to comprehensively analyze the distribution of mean prediction errors of items in order to reduce the scope of concerned items. Based on the suspected items, all anomalous users can be finally determined by analyzing the distribution of mean prediction error on each user. Extensive experiments on the MovieLens-100K dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/.

  2. 2.

    The ratio between the number of attackers and genuine users.

  3. 3.

    The ratio between the number of items rated by user u and the number of entire items in the recommender systems.

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Acknowledgments

The research is supported by NSFC (61175039, 61221063), 863 High Tech Development Plan (2012AA011003), Research Fund for Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (20090201120032), International Research Collaboration Project of Shaanxi Province (2013KW11) and Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (2012jdhz08).

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Correspondence to Zhongmin Cai .

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Yang, Z., Cai, Z., Chen, X. (2016). Detecting Anomalous Ratings Using Matrix Factorization for Recommender Systems. In: Cui, B., Zhang, N., Xu, J., Lian, X., Liu, D. (eds) Web-Age Information Management. WAIM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9659. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39958-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39958-4_1

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