Is trust robust?: an analysis of trust-based recommendation

Systems that adapt to input from users are susceptible to attacks from those same users. Recommender systems are common targets for such attacks since there are financial, political and many other motivations for influencing the promotion or demotion of recommendable items [2].Recent research has shown that incorporating trust and reputation models into the recommendation process can have a positive impact on the accuracy and robustness of recommendations. In this paper we examine the effect of using five different trust models in the recommendation process on the robustness of collaborative filtering in an attack situation. In our analysis we also consider the quality and accuracy of recommendations. Our results caution that including trust models in recommendation can either reduce or increase prediction shift for an attacked item depending on the model-building process used, while highlighting approaches that appear to be more robust.

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