Generating Predictive Movie Recommendations from Trust in Social Networks

摘要

Social networks are growing in number and size, with hundreds of millions of user accounts among them. One added benefit of these networks is that they allow users to encode more information about their relationships than just stating who they know. In this work, the authors are particularly interested in trust relationships, and how they can be used in designing interfaces. In this paper, they present FilmTrust, a web site that uses trust in web-based social networks to create predictive movie recommendations. Using the FilmTrust system as a foundation, they show that these recommendations are more accurate than other techniques when the user's opinions about a film are divergent from the average. They discuss this technique both as an application of social network analysis and how it suggests other analyses that can be performed to help improve collaborative filtering algorithms of all types.