Detection of shilling attacks in collaborative filtering recommender systems

Collaborative filtering recommender systems are essentially information systems which are capable of combining the judgment of a large group of people to make personalized recommendations and thereby alleviate the so-called information overload problem. However,collaborative filtering recommender systems are generally vulnerable to shilling attacks. Attackers can inject carefully chosen profiles into recommender systems in order to bias the recommendation results to their benefits. This may lead to a significant negative impact on the robustness of the systems. The main contribution of this paper is to build a probabilistic model for attack detection in the framework of probabilistic generative model. Experimental results show that this model can effectively detect shilling attacks of typical types.