Identifying attack models for securing cluster-based recommendation system

The immense growth of information has led to the wide usage of recommender systems for retrieving relevant information. One of the widely used methods for recommendation is collaborative filtering. However, such methods suffer from two problems, scalability and sparsity. In the proposed research, the two issues of collaborative filtering are addressed and a cluster-based recommender system is proposed. For the identification of potential clusters from the underlying network, the Shapley value concept is used, which divides users into different clusters. After that, the recommendation algorithm is performed in every respective cluster. The proposed system recommends an item to a specific user based on the ratings of the item’s different attributes. Thus, it reduces the running time of the overall algorithm, since it avoids the overhead of computation involved when the algorithm is executed over the entire dataset. Besides, the security of the recommender system is one of the major concerns nowadays. Attackers can come in the form of ordinary users and introduce bias in the system to force the system function that is advantageous for them. In this paper, we identify different attack models that could hamper the security of the proposed cluster-based recommender system. The efficiency of the proposed research is validated by conducting experiments on student dataset. © 2020 Bentham Science Publishers.