An unsupervised strategy for defending against multifarious reputation attacks

In electronic markets, malicious sellers often employ reviewers to carry out different types of attacks to improve their own reputations or destroy their opponents’ reputations. As such attacks may involve deception, collusion, and complex strategies, maintaining the robustness of reputation evaluation systems remains a challenging problem. From a platform manager’s view, no trader can be taken as a trustable benchmark for reference, therefore, accurate filtration of dishonest sellers and fraud reviewers and precise presentation of users’ reputations remains a challenging problem. Based on impression theory, this paper presents an unsupervised strategy, which first design a nearest neighbor search algorithm to select some typical lenient reviewers and strict reviewers. Then, based on these selected reviewers and the behavior expectation theory in impression theory, this paper adopts a classification algorithm that pre-classify sellers into honest and dishonest ones. Thirdly, another classification algorithm is designed to classify reviewers (i.e., buyers) into honest, dishonest, and uncertain ones according to their trading experiences with the pre-classified sellers. Finally, based on the ratings of various reviewers, this paper proposes a formula to estimate seller reputations. We further designed two general sets of experiments over simulated data and real data to evaluate our scheme, which demonstrate that our unsupervised scheme outperforms benchmark strategies in accurately estimating seller reputations. In particular, this strategy can robustly defend against various common attacks and unknown attacks.