Item Anomaly Detection Based on Dynamic Partition for Time Series in Recommender Systems

PLoS One. 2015 Aug 12;10(8):e0135155. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0135155. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

In recent years, recommender systems have become an effective method to process information overload. However, recommendation technology still suffers from many problems. One of the problems is shilling attacks-attackers inject spam user profiles to disturb the list of recommendation items. There are two characteristics of all types of shilling attacks: 1) Item abnormality: The rating of target items is always maximum or minimum; and 2) Attack promptness: It takes only a very short period time to inject attack profiles. Some papers have proposed item anomaly detection methods based on these two characteristics, but their detection rate, false alarm rate, and universality need to be further improved. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an item anomaly detection method based on dynamic partitioning for time series. This method first dynamically partitions item-rating time series based on important points. Then, we use chi square distribution (χ2) to detect abnormal intervals. The experimental results on MovieLens 100K and 1M indicate that this approach has a high detection rate and a low false alarm rate and is stable toward different attack models and filler sizes.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Computer Security*
  • Electronic Data Processing / methods*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (71102065, http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/,MG), National Key Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, 2013CB328903, http://www.973.gov.cn/AreaAppl.aspx), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2012M521680, http://jj.chinapostdoctor.org.cn/V1/Program1/Default.aspx, MG), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (106112014CDJZR095502&CDJZR12090001,http://www.edu.cn/zheng_ce_fa_gui_1115/20090820/t20090820_400962.shtml, MG). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.