Multiview Ensemble Method for Detecting Shilling Attacks in Collaborative Recommender Systems

Abstract

Faced with the evolving attacks in collaborative recommender systems, the conventional shilling detection methods rely mainly on one kind of user-generated information (i.e., single view) such as rating values, rating time, and item popularity. However, these methods often suffer from poor precision when detecting different attacks due to ignoring other potentially relevant information. To address this limitation, in this paper we propose a multiview ensemble method to detect shilling attacks in collaborative recommender systems. Firstly, we extract 17 user features by considering the temporal effects of item popularity and rating values in different popular item sets. Secondly, we devise a multiview ensemble detection framework by integrating base classifiers from different classification views. Particularly, we use a feature set partition algorithm to divide the features into several subsets to construct multiple optimal classification views. We introduce a repartition strategy to increase the diversity of views and reduce the influence of feature order. Finally, the experimental results on the Netflix and Amazon review datasets indicate that the proposed method has better performance than benchmark methods when detecting various synthetic attacks and real-world attacks.