Cleaning up toxic waste: Removing nefarious contributions to recommendation systems

• Post by: admin
• February 2, 2022
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Recommendation systems are becoming increasingly important, as evidenced by the popularity of the Netflix prize and the sophistication of various online shopping systems. With this increase in interest, a new problem of nefarious or false rankings that compromise a recommendation systems integrity has surfaced. We consider such purposefully erroneous rankings to be a form of toxic waste, corrupting the performance of the underlying algorithm. In this paper, we propose an adaptive reweighted algorithm as a possible approach towards correcting this problem. Our algorithm relies on finding a low-rank-plus-sparse decomposition of the recommendation matrix, where the adaptation of the weights aids in rejecting the malicious contributions. Simulations suggest that our algorithm converges fairly rapidly and produces accurate results.