Toward trustworthy social network services: A robust design of recommender systems

Abstract

In recent years, electronic commerce and online social networks (OSNs) have experienced fast growth, and as a result, recommendation systems (RSs) have become extremely common. Accuracy and robustness are important performance indexes that characterize customized information or suggestions provided by RSs. However, nefarious users may be present, and they can distort information within the RSs by creating fake identities (Sybils). Although prior research has attempted to mitigate the negative impact of Sybils, the presence of these fake identities remains an unsolved problem. In this paper, we introduce a new weighted link analysis and influence level for RSs resistant to Sybil attacks. Our approach is validated through simulations of a broad range of attacks, and it is found to outperform other state-of-the-art recommendation methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness.