A Robust Bayesian Probabilistic Matrix Factorization Model for Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems Based on User Anomaly Rating Behavior Detection

Collaborative filtering recommender systems are vulnerable to shilling attacks in which malicious users may inject biased profiles to promote or demote a particular item being recommended. To tackle this problem, many robust collaborative recommendation methods have been presented. Unfortunately, the robustness of most methods is improved at the expense of prediction accuracy. In this paper, we construct a robust Bayesian probabilistic matrix factorization model for collaborative filtering recommender systems by incorporating the detection of user anomaly rating behaviors. We first detect the anomaly rating behaviors of users by the modified K-means algorithm and target item identification method to generate an indicator matrix of attack users. Then we incorporate the indicator matrix of attack users to construct a robust Bayesian probabilistic matrix factorization model and based on which a robust collaborative recommendation algorithm is devised. The experimental results on the MovieLens and Netflix datasets show that our model can significantly improve the robustness and recommendation accuracy compared with three baseline methods. Keywords: Recommender systems, shilling attacks, anomaly rating behavior detection, robust Bayesian probabilistic matrix factorization