Online Corrupted User Detection and Regret Minimization

Abstract

In real-world online web systems, multiple users usually arrive sequentially into the system. For applications like click fraud and fake reviews, some users can maliciously perform corrupted (disrupted) behaviors to trick the system. Therefore, it is crucial to design efficient online learning algorithms to robustly learn from potentially corrupted user behaviors and accurately identify the corrupted users in an online manner. Existing works propose bandit algorithms robust to adversarial corruption. However, these algorithms are designed for a single user, and cannot leverage the implicit social relations among multiple users for more efficient learning. Moreover, none of them consider how to detect corrupted users online in the multiple-user scenario. In this paper, we present an important online learning problem named LOCUD to learn and utilize unknown user relations from disrupted behaviors to speed up learning, and identify the corrupted users in an online setting. To robustly learn and utilize the unknown relations among potentially corrupted users, we propose a novel bandit algorithm RCLUB-WCU. To detect the corrupted users, we devise a novel online detection algorithm OCCUD based on RCLUB-WCU's inferred user relations. We prove a regret upper bound for RCLUB-WCU, which asymptotically matches the lower bound with respect to $T$ up to logarithmic factors, and matches the state-of-the-art results in degenerate cases. We also give a theoretical guarantee for the detection accuracy of OCCUD. With extensive experiments, our methods achieve superior performance over previous bandit algorithms and high corrupted user detection accuracy.