Ward_p_HMM: A Shilling Attack Detection Technique Using Ward_p Method and Hidden Markov Model

Abstract

Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems (CFRSs) are widely employed in several applications because of its satisfying performance in the customized recommendation. Recent studies show that CFRSs are at risk of shilling attacks where attackers inject shilling profiles into the system. Malicious user injected ratings not only severely impact genuineness of recommendations but also user's trustworthiness within recommendation systems. Existing unsupervised clustering technique uses Ward method which is an iterative method of low scalability. For addressing this issue, in this work an unsupervised SA detection technique named WardpHMM has been proposed. It uses Ward_p and Hidden Markov Model (HMM). In this proposed method HMM is used to measure difference of user’s rating behavior. It generates User Suspicious Degree (USD) of each user by analyzing user’s Suspicious Degree Range of Items (SDRI) and User’s Matching Degree (UMD). Then Ward_p method is applied to merge users based on USD and to acquire group of Attack Users (AUs). For performance analysis of the proposed technique Amazon-ratings sample dataset has been used. The performance comparison shows that proposed Ward_pHMM technique outperforms baseline technique with respect to precision, recall and F1-score.