Trustor clustering with an improved recommender system based on social relationships

摘要

As we face a deluge of information in the modern world, the importance of recommender systems (RSs) that recommend relevant items to users has increased. The majority of existing RS schemes observe the prior ratings history of consumers to identify preferred items. However, current RSs suffer from the cold start problem, and their performance is dismal when new users or items appear. In order to address the cold start problem, a new type of solution that exploits social network features has been proposed. Many such social RSs analyze trustor-trustee relationships to discover latent social features shared between trustor and trustee. Since social relationships between trustors and trustees are directed, but not reciprocal, it is not guaranteed that a trustee has features in common with its trustors. Moreover, existing schemes are based on the assumption of independence between trustors who follow the same trustee, and therefore fail to recognize quintessential factors shared by the trustors.