Augmenting Collaborative Recommenders by Fusing Social Relationships: Membership and Friendship

Quan Yuan*, Li Chen, Shiwan Zhao

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in book/report/conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems often suffer from the sparsity problem, particularly for new and inactive users when they use the system. The emerging trend of social networking sites can potentially help alleviate the sparsity problem with their provided social relationship data, by which users' similar interests might be inferred even with few of their behavioral data with items (e.g., ratings). Previous works mainly focus on the friendship and trust relation in this respect. However, in this paper, we have in-depth explored a new kind of social relationship - the membership and its combinational effect with friendship. The social relationships are fused into the CF recommender via a graph-based framework on sparse and dense datasets as obtained from Last.fm. Our experiments have not only revealed the significant effects of the two relationships, especially the membership, in augmenting recommendation accuracy in the sparse data condition, but also identified the outperforming ability of the graph modeling in terms of realizing the optimal fusion mechanism.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRecommender Systems for the Social Web
EditorsJosé J. Pazos Arias, Ana Fernández Vilas, Rebeca P. Díaz Redondo
PublisherSpringer Berlin Heidelberg
Chapter8
Pages159-175
Number of pages17
Edition1st
ISBN (Electronic)9783642256943
ISBN (Print)9783642256936, 9783642446276
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 21 Jan 2012

Publication series

NameIntelligent Systems Reference Library
Volume32
ISSN (Print)1868-4394
ISSN (Electronic)1868-4408

Scopus Subject Areas

  • Computer Science(all)
  • Information Systems and Management
  • Library and Information Sciences

User-Defined Keywords

  • Recommender System
  • Sparse Data
  • Collaborative Filter
  • Random Walk Model
  • Social Data

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