Comparing Pre-filtering and Post-filtering Approach in a Collaborative Contextual Recommender System: An Application to E-Commerce

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.

“Shilling” attacks or “profile injection” attacks have always major challenges in collaborative filtering recommender systems (CFRSs). Many efforts have been devoted to improve collaborative filtering techniques which can eliminate the “shilling” attacks. However, most of them focused on detecting push attack or nuke attack which is rated with the highest score or lowest score on the target items. Few pay attention to grey attack when a target item is rated with a lower or higher scores than the average score, which shows a more hidden rating behavior than push or nuke attack. In this paper, we present a novel detection method to make recommender systems resistant to such attacks. To characterize grey ratings, we exploit rating deviation of item to discriminate between grey attack profiles and genuine profiles. In addition, we also employ novelty and popularity of item to construct rating series. Since it is difficult to discriminate between the rating series of attacker and genuine users, we incorporate into discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to amplify these differences based on the rating series of rating deviation, novelty and popularity, respectively. Finally, we respectively extract features from rating series of rating deviation-based, novelty-based and popularity-based by using amplitude domain analysis method and combine all clustered results as our detection results. We conduct a list of experiments on the Book-Crossing dataset in diverse attack models. Experimental results were included to validate the effectiveness of our approach in comparison with benchmarked methods.

Los sistemas de recomendación han tenido un rápido crecimiento tanto en investigación académica como en aplicaciones industriales en los últimos años. Las recomendaciones se nos proporcionan cuando elegimos elementos como música, películas, restaurantes, noticias, etc. Como parte de las técnicas de recomendación más prometedoras, los sistemas basados en recomendación de filtros colaborativos desempeñan un papel importante en las aplicaciones actuales. La aparición de nuevas fuentes de información requiere la combinación de sistemas de recomendación con técnicas avanzadas de otros campos, como el análisis de redes sociales, el procesamiento del lenguaje natural, el aprendizaje en profundidad, etc. Esta combinación mejora la calidad de las recomendaciones. Los sistemas de recomendación anteriores se centran principalmente en las mejoras de la precisión de la recomendación. Recientemente, surge una tendencia para la evaluación del rendimiento de los sistemas de recomendación que toma muchas propiedades nuevas en consideración. La fiabilidad es uno de los aspectos más notables y será profundamente estudiado en esta tesis. Se han propuesto algunas medidas para medir la fiabilidad de los sistemas de recomendación de filtrado colaborativo basados en la memoria. Sin embargo, observamos un área sin cubrir en el diseño de las medidas de fiabilidad adecuadas para los sistemas de recomendación de filtros colaborativos basados en modelos, especialmente aquellos basados en la factorización matricial. También encontramos que hay una falta de medidas de calidad de fiabilidad adecuadas. Esta tesis se concentra en proporcionar soluciones a ambas ausencias. Después de un estudio exhaustivo de trabajos de investigación del estado del arte, proponemos una nueva medida de fiabilidad que supera los desafíos de generalización y abstracción causados por los factores latentes de los métodos de factorización matricial. La medida propuesta se compara con con métodos y algoritmos representativos, usando bases de datos publicas, tanto académicas como comerciales. Los resultados experimentales muestran que nuestra nueva medida logra mejoras en la calidad de la recomendación. Además, la medida de fiabilidad propuesta también tiene un impacto muy positivo contra los "Shilling Attacks". Para obtener una mejora respecto a las medidas existentes de calidad de la fiabilidad, también proponemos, hasta donde sabemos, la primera medida de calidad de fiabilidad universal que es capaz de proporcionar valores numéricos para cualquier tipo de sistema de recomendación. Esta medida también se ha probado usando conjuntos de datos públicos reales y ha sido comparada con los métodos de calidad de la fiabilidad existentes. Basándonos en los resultados de los experimentos, concluimos que nuestra medida supera los últimos trabajos de investigación, proporcionando valores de calidad de fiabilidad más precisos e informativos. ----------ABSTRACT---------- Recommender systems have experienced a rapid growth in both academical research and industrial applications in latest years. Recommendations are provided to us when we choose items such as music, movies, restaurants, news, etc. As the most promising recommendation techniques, collaborative filtering recommender systems play an important role in current applications. The emergence of novel information sources requires to combine recommender systems with several advanced techniques coming from other fields like social network analysis, natural language processing, deep learning etc. This combination improves the quality of recommendations. Previous recommender systems research mainly focuses on the improvements of recommendation accuracy. Recently a new trend arises for the performance evaluation of recommender systems that takes many novel properties into consideration. Reliability is one of the most remarkable aspects, which will be deeply studied in this thesis. Some measures have been proposed for measuring reliability of memory based collaborative filtering recommender systems. However, we observe a gap in the design of proper reliability measures for model based collaborative filtering recommender systems, especially those based on matrix factorization. We also found that there is a lack in proper reliability quality measures. This thesis concentrates on providing solutions to both lacks. After a comprehensive study of state-of-the-art research works, we propose a novel reliability measure that overcomes the challenges of generality and abstraction caused by latent factors of matrix factorization methods. The proposed measure is tested against current baselines on public academic and commercial datasets; experiment results show that our novel measure achieves better improvements on recommendation quality. What’s more, the proposed reliability measure also has a very positive impact against shilling attacks. In order to fill in the blank of reliability quality measures, we also propose, as far as we know, the first universal reliability quality measure that is able to provide numerical values for any type of recommender systems. This measure has also been tested on public academic and commercial datasets using current methods. Based on the experiment results we conclude that our quality measure outperforms state-of-the-art research works by providing more accurate and informative reliability quality values.

Recommender systems provide users with product information and suggestions, which has gradually become an important research tool in e-commerce IT technology, which has attracted a lot of attention of researchers. Collaborative filtering recommendation technology has been the most successful recommendation technology so far, but there are two major problems—recommendation quality and scalability. At present, research at home and abroad mainly focuses on recommendation quality, and there is less discussion on scalability. The scalability problem is that as the size of the system increases, the response time of the system increases to a point where users cannot afford it. Existing solutions often result in a significant drop in recommendation quality while reducing recommendation response time. In this paper, the clustering analysis subsystem based on the genetic algorithm is innovatively introduced into the traditional collaborative filtering recommendation system, and its design and implementation are given. In addition, when obtaining the nearest neighbors, only the clustered users of the target user are searched, making it a collaborative filtering recommender system based on genetic clustering. The experimental results show that the response time of the traditional collaborative filtering recommender system increases linearly with the increase in the number of users while the response time of the collaborative filtering recommender system based on genetic clustering remains unchanged with the increase in the number of users. On the other hand, the recommendation quality of the collaborative filtering recommender system based on genetic clustering is basically not degraded compared with that of the traditional collaborative filtering recommender system. Therefore, the collaborative filtering recommender system based on genetic clustering can effectively solve the scalability problem of the collaborative filtering recommender system.

Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems have been extensively developed and widely deployed in various social websites, promoting products or services to the users of interest. Meanwhile, work has been attempted at poisoning attacks to CF recommender systems for distorting the recommend results to reap commercial or personal gains stealthily. While existing poisoning attacks have demonstrated their effectiveness with the offline social datasets, they are impractical when applied to the real setting on online social websites. This paper develops a novel and practical poisoning attack solution toward the CF recommender systems without knowing involved specific algorithms nor historical social data information a priori. Instead of directly attacking the unknown recommender systems, our solution performs certain operations on the social websites to collect a set of sampling data for use in constructing a surrogate model for deeply learning the inherent recommendation patterns. This surrogate model can estimate the item proximities, learned by the recommender systems. By attacking the surrogate model, the corresponding solutions (for availability and target attacks) can be directly migrated to attack the original recommender systems. Extensive experiments validate the generated surrogate model's reproductive capability and demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack upon various CF recommender algorithms.

As e-commerce offers more and more choices for users, its structure becomes more and more complicated. Inevitably, it brings about the problem of information overload. The solution to this problem is an e-commerce personalized recommendation system using machine learning technology. People often seem confused when facing extensive information and cannot grasp the key points. This paper studies the personalized recommendation technology of e-commerce: deeply analyzes the related technologies and algorithms of the e-commerce recommendation system and proposes the latest architecture of the e-commerce recommendation system according to the current development status of the e-commerce recommendation system. The system recommends accuracy and real-time requirements and divides the system into two parts: offline mining and online recommendation and analyzes and implements the functions and technologies of each part. User-based recommender systems, collaborative filtering recommender systems, and content-based recommender systems are analyzed, respectively. The personalized recommendation cannot only quickly help customers find the required commodity information in a wide range of complex information but also can compare more commodity information to help customers to judge. However, the existing recommendation system has some problems such as the lack of recommendation personality, the reduced relevance of recommendation, and the poor timeliness of recommendation. Finally, a recommendation system that combines three recommendation algorithms is designed, and experiments are carried out. The newly designed recommendation system is compared with three different recommendation systems, and a summary and outlook are made. Based on the introduction of the relevant theories, characteristics, and mainstream technologies of personalized recommendation based on machine learning, this document presents a constructive example of a model based on the factors that influence personalized e-commerce information recommendations in the retail sector. Through questionnaire surveys, we analyze and design the influencing factors for consumers to purchase personalized products after the survey and build a project using state-of-the-art field learning techniques. Through the model to test the eight hypotheses proposed in this paper, the results show that customer income level, customer online shopping experience, commodity prices, product quality, recommendation relevance, credit evaluation, and service quality will have a significant positive impact on shopping willingness and ultimately affect the customer’s shopping behavior. e-commerce platform can use this influencing factor to establish personalized information recommendation service mode.

Currently the use of web recommendation techniques is growing worldwide with aim of providing the custom-made required data to end users. Most of the web users complain about finding useful information on web sites. Web recommender systems predict the information needs of users and provide them with recommendations to facilitate their navigation. Recommender systems have been extensively explored in web mining. The web recommendation systems are split into two main categories such as collaborative recommendation system and content based recommendation system. However, the quality of recommendations and the user satisfaction with such systems are still not optimal. In adaptive association recommender systems based on web mining techniques have strengths and weaknesses. One of these weaknesses is lack of consideration of an appropriate measure to calculate the user’s interest degree of pages. Applying Fuzzy Association Rule Mining (FARM) algorithm to a recommender system leads to calculate user’s interest of pages more accurately. Consequently generated recommendations will be more desirable when compared to other association rule mining techniques.

Nowadays, collaborative filtering recommender systems have been widely deployed in many commercial companies to make profit. Neighborhood‐based collaborative filtering (CF) is common and effective. To date, despite its effectiveness, there has been little effort to explore their robustness and the impact of data poisoning attacks on their performance. Can the neighborhood‐based recommender systems be easily fooled? To this end, we shed light on the robustness of neighborhood‐based recommender systems and propose a novel data poisoning attack framework, encoding the purpose of attack and constraint against them. We first illustrate how to calculate the optimal data poisoning attack, namely, UNAttack. We inject a few well‐designed fake users into the recommender systems such that target items will be recommended to as many normal users as possible. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real‐world datasets to validate the effectiveness and the transferability of our proposed method. In addition, some interesting phenomena can be found. For example, (i) neighborhood‐based recommender systems with Euclidean distance‐based similarity have strong robustness and (ii) the fake users can be transferred to attack the state‐of‐the‐art CF recommender systems such as neural CF and Bayesian personalized ranking matrix factorization.

Collaborative filtering (CF) technique in recommender systems (RS) is a well-known and popular technique that exploits relationships between users or items to make product recommendations to an active user. The effectiveness of existing memory based algorithms depend on the similarity measure that is used to identify nearest neighbours. However, similarity measures utilize only the ratings of co-rated items while computing the similarity between a pair of users or items. In most of the e-commerce applications, the rating matrix is too sparse since even active users of an online system tend to rate only a few items of the entire set of items. Therefore, co-rated items among users are even sparser. Moreover, the ratings a user gives an individual item tells us nothing about his comprehensive interest without which the generated recommendations may not be satisfactory to a user. In order to be able to address these issues, a comprehensive study is made of the various existing measures of similarity in a collaborative filtering recommender system (CFRS) and a hierarchical categorization of products has been proposed to understand the interest of a user in a wider scope so as to provide better recommendations as well as to alleviate data sparsity.

With the rapid development of e-commerce, collaborative filtering recommendation system has been widely used in various network platforms. Using recommendation system to accurately predict customers’ preferences for goods can solve the problem of information overload faced by users and improve users’ dependence on the network platform. Because the recommendation system based on collaborative filtering technology has the ability to recommend more abstract or difficult to describe goods in words, the research related to collaborative filtering technology has attracted more and more attention. According to the past research, in collaborative filtering algorithm, if Pearson correlation coefficient is used, errors will occur under special circumstances. In this study, the normal recovery similarity measure is used to modify the similarity value to correct the error value of a collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm. Based on this, a big data analysis method based on a modified collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm is proposed. This research implemented it in the cloud Hadoop environment, and measure the execution time with 2, 5 and 8 nodes. Then the research compared it with the execution time of a single machine, and analyze its speedup ratio and efficiency. The experimental results show that the execution time increases with the number of neighbors. When the number of nodes is 5 and 8, the execution time is greatly improved, which improves the efficiency of collaborative filtering algorithm and can cope with massive data in the future.

The selection of an interesting blog is becoming ever increasingly tough work for most users as the number of blogs is exponentially increasing every day. A Recommender System (RS) can help the user to find out the blog of his choice or based on parameters specified by him. The accuracy of RS to find out the right blogs for a particular user gets enhanced, if the text of blog is analyzed using semantic analysis. The RS uses the classification of blogs to find out the right blogs for a user. The information with respect to blogs like blog's title, tags given by blogger, blog image etc., provides good information to classify the blogs. A classification of text can be done using Part of Speech (POS) text analyzer. POS tagger of text provides information about the blogs that can be used to find the similarity between two blogs. The similar types of blogs can be kept together to provide better indexing in the set of large blogs. The paper finds the better accuracy of Collaborative Filtering Recommender System (CF RS) for bloggers when the blogs are processed with different text analysis using semantic information of blogs. The observation is addressed by computing various measures like Precision, Recall and F1.

Learning to rank with pairwise loss functions has been found useful in collaborative filtering recommender systems. At web scale, the optimization is often based on matrix factorization with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) which has a sequential nature. We investigate two different shared memory lock-free parallel SGD schemes based on block partitioning and no partitioning for use with pairwise loss functions. To speed up convergence to a solution, we extrapolate simple practical algorithms from their application to pointwise learning to rank. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are quite useful regarding their ranking ability and speedup patterns in comparison to their sequential counterpart.

This article describes clustering approach to neighbourhood calculation in collaborative filtering recommender systems. Precise identification of neighbours of an active object (a user to whom recommendations are generated) is very important due to its direct impact on quality of generated recommendation lists. Clustering techniques, although improving time effectiveness of recommender systems, can negatively affect quality (precision) of recommendations. In this article it is proposed a new algorithm based on multi-clustering, as well as author’s description of this term. Despite of various definitions in papers, a common distinctive feature of multi-clustering is its multiple point of view of one dataset. Various views discover their different aspects, selecting the most appropriate data model to solution of a current problem. The article contains experiments confirming advantage of multi-clustering approach over the traditional method based on single-scheme clustering. The results include recommendation quality and time effectiveness comparison, as well.

The closed feedback loop in recommender systems is a common setting that can lead to different types of biases. Several studies have dealt with these biases by designing methods to mitigate their effect on the recommendations. However, most existing studies do not consider the iterative behavior of the system where the closed feedback loop plays a crucial role in incorporating different biases into several parts of the recommendation steps. We present a theoretical framework to model the asymptotic evolution of the different components of a recommender system operating within a feedback loop setting, and derive theoretical bounds and convergence properties on quantifiable measures of the user discovery and blind spots. We also validate our theoretical findings empirically using a real-life dataset and empirically test the efficiency of a basic exploration strategy within our theoretical framework. Our findings lay the theoretical basis for quantifying the effect of feedback loops and for designing Artificial Intelligence and machine learning algorithms that explicitly incorporate the iterative nature of feedback loops in the machine learning and recommendation process.

A clustering based approach to improving the efficiency of collaborative filtering recommendation