CluCF: a clustering CF algorithm to address data sparsity problem

In QoS-based Web service recommendation, predicting Quality of Service (QoS) for users will greatly aid service selection and discovery. Collaborative filtering (CF) is an effective method for Web service selection and recommendation. Data sparsity is an important challenges for CF algorithms. Although model-based algorithms can address the data sparsity problem, those models are often time-consuming to build and update. Thus, these CF algorithms aren’t fit for highly dynamic and large-scale environments, such as Web service recommendation systems. In order to overcome this drawback, this paper proposes a novel approach CluCF, which employs user clusters and service clusters to address the data sparsity problem and classifies the new user (the new service) by location factor to lower the time complexity of updating clusters. Additionally, in order to improve the prediction accuracy, CluCF employs time factor. Time-aware user-service matrix Mu;s(tk, d) is introduced, and the time-aware similarity measurement and time-aware QoS prediction are employed in this paper. Since the QoS performance of Web services is highly related to invocation time due to some time-varying factors (e.g., service status, network condition), time-aware similarity measurement and time-aware QoS prediction are more trustworthy than traditional similarity measurement and QoS prediction, respectively. Since similarity measurement and QoS prediction are two key steps of neighborhood-based CF, time-aware CF will be more accurate than traditional CF. Moreover, our approach systematically combines user-based and item-based methods and employs influence weights to balance these two predicted values, automatically. To validate our algorithm, this paper conducts a series of large-scale experiments based on a real-world Web service QoS dataset. Experimental results show that our approach is capable of alleviating the data sparsity problem.     

A Web service QoS prediction approach based on time- and location-aware collaborative filtering

In QoS-based Web service recommendation, predicting quality of service (QoS) for users will greatly aid service selection and discovery. Collaborative filtering (CF) is an effective method for Web service selection and recommendation. CF algorithms can be divided into two main categories: memory-based and model-based algorithms. Memory-based CF algorithms are easy to implement and highly effective, but they suffer from a fundamental problem: inability to scale-up. Model-based CF algorithms, such as clustering CF algorithms, address the scalability problem by seeking users for recommendation within smaller and highly similar clusters, rather than within the entire database. However, they are often time-consuming to build and update. In this paper, we propose a time-aware and location-aware CF algorithms. To validate our algorithm, this paper conducts series of large-scale experiments based on a real-world Web service QoS data set. Experimental results show that our approach is capable of addressing the three important challenges of recommender systems–high quality of prediction, high scalability, and easy to build and update.     

一种动态混合QoS语义的Web服务个性化推荐模型

服务推荐是服务计算中的主要问题之一,当前大多针对功能属性进行推荐,而在Web服务的QoS属性方面考虑较少,并且不支持动态变化的QoS属性。基于动态混合QoS的语义Web服务个性化推荐模型,把语义Web技术引入Web服务中,在QoS监控器下,有效监测Web服务的QoS属性变化并动态更新Web服务的QoS属性。根据建立的用户兴趣模型,向用户推荐具有个性化的Web服务。此外,在个性化推荐系统中使用最广泛的协同过滤推荐技术基础上,对数据进行了一系列的预处理填充,而且充分考虑了不同时间的项目评分对推荐的影响。结合用户兴趣度和用户评分的相似性计算方法,并通过不同的权值来表示它们的重要程度,综合计算目标用户的最近邻居集合,最终对用户u产生推荐。该系统在一定程度上提高了服务推荐的效率和准确度并满足用户查询需求。     

基于属性优化矩阵补全的抗托攻击推荐算法

托攻击是当前推荐系统面临的严峻挑战之一。由于推荐系统的开放性,恶意用户可轻易对其注入精心设计的评分从而影响推荐结果,降低用户体验。基于属性优化结构化噪声矩阵补全技术,提出一种鲁棒的抗托攻击个性化推荐（SATPR）算法,将攻击评分视为评分矩阵中的结构化行噪声并采用L2,1范数进行噪声建模,同时引入用户与物品的属性特征以提高托攻击检测精度。实验表明,SATPR算法在托攻击下可取得比传统推荐算法更精确的个性化评分预测效果。     

基于用户声誉的鲁棒协同推荐算法

随着推荐系统在电子商务界的快速发展以及取得的巨大经济收益, 有目的性的托攻击是目前协同过滤系统面临的重大安全威胁, 研究一种可抵御攻击的鲁棒推荐技术已成为目前推荐系统领域的重要课题.本文利用历史记录得到用户声誉, 建立声誉推荐系统, 并结合协同过滤推荐领域内的隐语义模型, 提出基于用户声誉的隐语义模型鲁棒协同算法.本文提出的算法从人为攻击和自然噪声两个方面对系统的鲁棒性进行了改善.在真实的数据集 Movielens 1M 上的实验表明, 与现有的鲁棒性推荐算法相比, 这种算法具有形式简单、可解释性强、稳定的特点, 且在精度得到一定提升的情况下大大增强了系统抵御攻击的能力.     

QoS prediction for web services based on user-trust propagation model

There is an important online role for Web service providers and users; however, the rapidly growing number of service providers and users, it can create some similar functions among web services. This is an exciting area for research, and researchers seek to to propose solutions for the best service to users. Collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms are widely used in recommendation systems, although these are less effective for cold-start users. Recently, some recommender systems have been developed based on social network models, and the results show that social network models have better performance in terms of CF, especially for cold-start users. However, most social network-based recommendations do not consider the user’s mood. This is a hidden source of information, and is very useful in improving prediction efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a new model called User-Trust Propagation (UTP). The model uses a combination of trust and the mood of users to predict the QoS value and matrix factorisation (MF), which is used to train the model. The experimental results show that the proposed model gives better accuracy than other models, especially for the cold-start problem.     

Shilling attack detection utilizing semi-supervised learning method for collaborative recommender system

Collaborative filtering (CF) technique is capable of generating personalized recommendations. However, the recommender systems utilizing CF as their key algorithms are vulnerable to shilling attacks which insert malicious user profiles into the systems to push or nuke the reputations of targeted items. There are only a small number of labeled users in most of the practical recommender systems, while a large number of users are unlabeled because it is expensive to obtain their identities. In this paper, Semi-SAD, a new semi-supervised learning based shilling attack detection algorithm is proposed to take advantage of both types of data. It first trains a naïve Bayes classifier on a small set of labeled users, and then incorporates unlabeled users with EM-λ to improve the initial naïve Bayes classifier. Experiments on MovieLens datasets are implemented to compare the efficiency of Semi-SAD with supervised learning based detector and unsupervised learning based detector. The results indicate that Semi-SAD can better detect various kinds of shilling attacks than others, especially against obfuscated and hybrid shilling attacks.     

面向用户群体的Web服务推荐

针对Web服务推荐中服务用户调用Web服务的服务质量数据稀疏性导致的低推荐质量问题,提出了一种面向用户群体并基于协同过滤的Web服务推荐算法(WRUG)。首先,为每个服务用户根据用户相似性矩阵构建其个性化的相似用户群体;其次,以相似用户群体中心点代替群体从而计算用户群体相似性矩阵;最后,构造面向群体的Web服务推荐公式并为目标用户预测缺失的Web服务质量。通过对197万条真实Web服务质量调用记录的数据集进行对比实验,与传统基于协同过滤的推荐算法(TCF)和基于用户群体影响的协同过滤推荐算法(CFBUGI)相比,WRUG的平均绝对误差下降幅度分别为28.9%和4.57%;并且WRUG的覆盖率上升幅度分别为110%和22.5%。实验结果表明,在相同实验条件下WRUG不仅能提高Web服务推荐系统的预测准确性,而且能显著地提高其有效预测服务质量的百分比。     

Social network-based service recommendation with trust enhancement

Given the increasing applications of service computing and cloud computing, a large number of Web services are deployed on the Internet, triggering the research of Web service recommendation. Despite of service QoS, the use of user feedback is becoming the current trend in service recommendation. Likewise in traditional recommender systems, sparsity, cold-start and trustworthiness are major issues challenging service recommendation in adopting similarity-based approaches. Meanwhile, with the prevalence of social networks, nowadays people become active in interacting with various computers and users, resulting in a huge volume of data available, such as service information, user-service ratings, interaction logs, and user relationships. Therefore, how to incorporate the trust relationship in social networks with user feedback for service recommendation motivates this work. In this paper, we propose a social network-based service recommendation method with trust enhancement known as RelevantTrustWalker. First, a matrix factorization method is utilized to assess the degree of trust between users in social network. Next, an extended random walk algorithm is proposed to obtain recommendation results. To evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm, experiments on a real-world dataset are conducted and experimental results indicate that the quality of the recommendation and the speed of the method are improved compared with existing algorithms.     

一种结合用户可信度与相似度的鲁棒性推荐算法

协同过滤推荐系统面临着托攻击的安全威胁。研究抵御托攻击的鲁棒性推荐算法已成为一个迫切的课题。传统的鲁棒性推荐算法在算法稳定性与推荐准确度之间难以权衡。针对该问题,首先定义一种用户可信度指标,其次改进传统的相似度计算方法,通过结合用户可信度与改进的相似度,滤除攻击概貌,为目标用户作出推荐。实验表明,与传统算法相比,本文算法具备更强的稳定性,同时保持了良好的推荐准确度。     

一种探测推荐系统托攻击的无监督算法

托攻击是当前推荐系统面临的重大安全性问题之一.开发托攻击探测算法已成为保障推荐系统准确性与鲁棒性的关键.针对现有托攻击探测算法无监督程度较低的局限,在引入攻击概貌群体效应的定量度量及基于此的遗传优化目标函数的基础上,将自适应参数的后验推断与攻击探测过程相融合,提出了迭代贝叶斯推断遗传探测算法,降低了算法探测性能对系统相...     

基于灰色关联度聚类与标签重叠因子结合的协同过滤推荐方法研究

协同过滤算法是目前被广泛运用在推荐系统领域的最成功技术之一,但是面对用户数量的快速增长及相应的评分数据的缺失,推荐系统中的数据稀疏性问题也越来越明显,严重地影响着推荐的质量和效率。针对传统协同过滤算法中的稀疏性问题,采用了基于灰色关联度的方法对用户评分矩阵进行数据标准化处理,得到用户关联度并形成关联度矩阵;然后对关联矩阵中的用户进行关联度聚类,以减少相似性算法的复杂度;之后利用标签重叠因子对传统计算用户相似性的协同过滤算法进行改进,将重叠因子与用户评分以非线性形式进行组合;最后通过实例改进后的算法在推荐精确度上有着较大的提高。     

基于可信推荐的服务质量评估模型

由于网络用户多样性和利益诉求的复杂性,部分用户发布的QoS数据不完全可信,以致影响了QoS评估的精度,为此提出基于可信推荐的QoS评估模型TR-SQE。该模型以用户推荐的与众不同程度作为其推荐信任度,隔离推荐信任度低于阈值的用户发布的QoS数据;TR-SQE将修正过的QOS信息作为推荐数据,接着根据用户与推荐者的偏好相似性来评估服务质量。分析和仿真结果表明,TR-SQE的平均绝对偏差MAE较其他方法小,评估结果与真实的服务质量基本相符,TR-SQE有助于用户的服务选择。     

基于二分图划分联合聚类的协同过滤推荐算法

准确而积极地向用户提供他们可能感兴趣的信息或服务是推荐系统的主要任务。协同过滤是采用得最广泛的推荐算法之一,而数据稀疏的问题往往严重影响推荐质量。为了解决这个问题,提出了基于二分图划分联合聚类的协同过滤推荐算法。首先将用户与项目构建成二分图进行联合聚类,从而映射到低维潜在特征空间;其次根据聚类结果改进2种相似性计算策略:簇偏好相似性和评分相似性,并将二者相结合。基于结合的相似性,分别采用基于用户和项目的方法来获得对未知目标评分的预测。最后,将这些预测结果进行融合。实验结果表明,所提算法比最新的联合聚类协同过滤推荐算法具有更好的性能。     

Sequence-based trust in collaborative filtering for document recommendation

Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems have emerged in various applications to support item recommendation, which solve the information-overload problem by suggesting items of interest to users. Recently, trust-based recommender systems have incorporated the trustworthiness of users into CF techniques to improve the quality of recommendation. They propose trust computation models to derive the trust values based on users' past ratings on items. A user is more trustworthy if s/he has contributed more accurate predictions than other users. Nevertheless, conventional trust-based CF methods do not address the issue of deriving the trust values based on users' various information needs on items over time. In knowledge-intensive environments, users usually have various information needs in accessing required documents over time, which forms a sequence of documents ordered according to their access time. We propose a sequence-based trust model to derive the trust values based on users' sequences of ratings on documents. The model considers two factors – time factor and document similarity – in computing the trustworthiness of users. The proposed model enhanced with the similarity of user profiles is incorporated into a standard collaborative filtering method to discover trustworthy neighbors for making predictions. The experiment result shows that the proposed model can improve the prediction accuracy of CF method in comparison with other trust-based recommender systems.     

Robustness analysis of arbitrarily distributed data-based recommendation methods

Due to different shopping routines of people, rating preferences of many customers might be partitioned between two parties. Since two different e-companies might sell products from the same range to the identical set of customers, the type of data partition is called arbitrarily. In the case of arbitrarily distributed data, it is a challenge to produce accurate recommendations for those customers, because their ratings are split. Therefore, researchers propose methods for enabling data holders’ collaboration. In this scenario, privacy becomes a deterrent barrier for collaboration, accordingly, the introduced solutions include private protocols for protecting parties’ confidentiality. Although, private protocols encourage data owners to collaborate, they introduce a new drawback for partnership. Since, whole data is distributed and parties do not have full control of data, any malicious user, who knows that two parties collaborate, can easily insert shilling profiles to system by partitioning them between data holders. Parties can have trouble to find such profile injection attacks by employing existing detection methods because of they are arbitrarily distributed. Since profile injection attacks can easily performed on arbitrarily distributed data-based recommender systems, quality, and reliability of such systems decreases, and it causes angry customers. Therefore, in this paper, we try to describe aforementioned problems with arbitrarily distributed data-based recommender systems. As a first step, we analyze robustness of proposed arbitrarily distributed data-based recommendation methods against six well-known shilling attack types. Secondly, we explain why existing detection methods cannot detect malicious user profiles in distributed data. We perform experiments on a well-known movie data set, and according to our results, arbitrarily distributed data-based recommendation methods are vulnerable to shilling attacks.     

基于位置聚类和张量分解的Web服务推荐算法

基于服务质量（QoS）的Web服务推荐能在众多功能相似的Web服务中发现最能满足用户非功能需求的Web服务,但QoS属性值预测算法仍存在预测准确度不高和数据稀疏性的问题。针对以上问题,提出了一种基于位置聚类和分层张量分解的QoS预测算法ClustTD,该算法基于用户和服务的位置属性将用户和服务聚类成多个局部组,分别对局部组和全局的用户、服务和时间上下文进行张量建模和分解,将局部和全局张量分解的QoS预测值进行加权组合,同时考虑了局部和全局因素,获得最终QoS预测值。实验结果表明,该算法具有较高的QoS预测准确率和Web服务推荐质量,并能在一定程度上解决数据稀疏性问题。     

Collaborative filtering and deep learning based recommendation system for cold start items

Recommender system is a specific type of intelligent systems, which exploits historical user ratings on items and/or auxiliary information to make recommendations on items to the users. It plays a critical role in a wide range of online shopping, e-commercial services and social networking applications. Collaborative filtering (CF) is the most popular approaches used for recommender systems, but it suffers from complete cold start (CCS) problem where no rating record are available and incomplete cold start (ICS) problem where only a small number of rating records are available for some new items or users in the system. In this paper, we propose two recommendation models to solve the CCS and ICS problems for new items, which are based on a framework of tightly coupled CF approach and deep learning neural network. A specific deep neural network SADE is used to extract the content features of the items. The state of the art CF model, timeSVD++, which models and utilizes temporal dynamics of user preferences and item features, is modified to take the content features into prediction of ratings for cold start items. Extensive experiments on a large Netflix rating dataset of movies are performed, which show that our proposed recommendation models largely outperform the baseline models for rating prediction of cold start items. The two proposed recommendation models are also evaluated and compared on ICS items, and a flexible scheme of model retraining and switching is proposed to deal with the transition of items from cold start to non-cold start status. The experiment results on Netflix movie recommendation show the tight coupling of CF approach and deep learning neural network is feasible and very effective for cold start item recommendation. The design is general and can be applied to many other recommender systems for online shopping and social networking applications. The solution of cold start item problem can largely improve user experience and trust of recommender systems, and effectively promote cold start items.     

Unsupervised strategies for shilling detection and robust collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering systems are essentially social systems which base their recommendation on the judgment of a large number of people. However, like other social systems, they are also vulnerable to manipulation by malicious social elements. Lies and Propaganda may be spread by a malicious user who may have an interest in promoting an item, or downplaying the popularity of another one. By doing this systematically, with either multiple identities, or by involving more people, malicious user votes and profiles can be injected into a collaborative recommender system. This can significantly affect the robustness of a system or algorithm, as has been studied in previous work. While current detection algorithms are able to use certain characteristics of shilling profiles to detect them, they suffer from low precision, and require a large amount of training data. In this work, we provide an in-depth analysis of shilling profiles and describe new approaches to detect malicious collaborative filtering profiles. In particular, we exploit the similarity structure in shilling user profiles to separate them from normal user profiles using unsupervised dimensionality reduction. We present two detection algorithms; one based on PCA, while the other uses PLSA. Experimental results show a much improved detection precision over existing methods without the usage of additional training time required for supervised approaches. Finally, we present a novel and highly effective robust collaborative filtering algorithm which uses ideas presented in the detection algorithms using principal component analysis.     

一种检测兴趣漂移的图结构推荐系统

协同过滤是构造推荐系统最有效的方法之一.其中,基于图结构推荐方法成为近来协同过滤的研究热点.基于图结构的方法视用户和项为图的结点,并利用图理论去计算用户和项之间的相似度.尽管人们对图结构推荐系统开展了很多的研究和应用,然而这些研究都认为用户的兴趣是保持不变的,所以不能够根据用户兴趣的相关变化做出合理推荐.本文提出一种新的可以检测用户兴趣漂移的图结构推荐系统.首先,设计了一个新的兴趣漂移检测方法,它可以有效地检测出用户兴趣在何时发生了哪种变化.其次,根据用户的兴趣序列,对评分项进行加权并构造用户特征向量.最后,整合二部投影与随机游走进行项推荐.在标准数据集MovieLens上的测试表明算法优于两个图结构推荐方法和一个评分时间加权的协同过滤方法.