Robustness analysis of privacy-preserving model-based recommendation schemes

Privacy-preserving model-based recommendation methods are preferable over privacy-preserving memory-based schemes due to their online efficiency. Model-based prediction algorithms without privacy concerns have been investigated with respect to shilling attacks. Similarly, various privacy-preserving model-based recommendation techniques have been proposed to handle privacy issues. However, privacy-preserving model-based collaborative filtering schemes might be subjected to shilling or profile injection attacks. Therefore, their robustness against such attacks should be scrutinized. In this paper, we investigate robustness of four well-known privacy-preserving model-based recommendation methods against six shilling attacks. We first apply masked data-based profile injection attacks to privacy-preserving k-means-, discrete wavelet transform-, singular value decomposition-, and item-based prediction algorithms. We then perform comprehensive experiments using real data to evaluate their robustness against profile injection attacks. Next, we compare non-private model-based methods with their privacy-preserving correspondences in terms of robustness. Moreover, well-known privacy-preserving memory- and model-based prediction methods are compared with respect to robustness against shilling attacks. Our empirical analysis show that couple of model-based schemes with privacy are very robust. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.