Large-scale Fake Click Detection for E-commerce Recommendation Systems

With the development of e-commerce platforms, e-commerce recommendation systems are playing an increasingly important role for the purpose of product recommendation. As a new attack model against e-commerce recommendation systems, the "Ride Item's Coattails" attack creates fake click information to establish the deceptive correlation between popular products and low-quality products in order to mislead the recommendation system of e-commerce platform to boost the sales of low-quality products. This attack is characterized by high concealment and strong destructiveness, which can cause great damage to e-commerce recommendation systems, and adversely affect the usability of the e-commerce platform and users' shopping experience. It is therefore of great practical significance to study how to quickly and effectively identify the false click information and the corresponding "Ride Item's Coattails" attack to better safeguard e-commerce recommendation systems. At present, there is no previously reported relevant research work conducted specifically for addressing the detection of the "Ride Item's Coattails" attack. In this work, we carried out pioneering work in analyzing and summarizing the characteristics of the false click information produced by attackers on the target products in the "Ride Item's Coattails" attack and designed a set of attack detection techniques suitable for e-commerce recommendation systems. Experimental results on real e-commerce datasets show that our proposed techniques can quickly and effectively detect the large-scale fake click information as well as the associated "Ride Item's Coattails" attack in e-commerce recommendation systems.