사용자 간 신뢰관계 네트워크 분석을 활용한 협업 필터링 알고리즘의 예측 정확도 개선

Abstract

협업 필터링(Collaborative Filtering)은 유용성과 정교성 면에서 가장 성공적인 추천 알고리즘으로 평가받으며 산업계나 학계에서 많이 활용 및 연구되고 있지만, 기본적으로 사용자들이 평가한 점수에만 기반하여 추천결과를 생성하는 한계점이 있다. 이에 본 연구는 사용자가 상품을 구매할 때 자신이 신뢰하는 타인의 추천을 더 적극적으로 수용할 것이라는 점에 착안하여, 사용자의 평점 외에 사용자 간 신뢰관계를 소셜네트워크분석으로 분석한 결과를 추가로 반영하는 추천 알고리즘들을 제안하였다. 구체적으로 본 연구에서는 소셜네트워크분석에서 네트워크 내의 중심적 위치를 나타내는 척도인 내향 및 외향 중심성을 활용하여 사용자 간 유사도를 산출하는 알고리즘들과 사용자 신뢰 네트워크를 탐색하여 추천 대상이 되는 사용자가 직접 간접적으로 신뢰하는 사용자의 평가점수를 보다 높게 반영하는 알고리즘을 제안한 뒤 그 성능을 비교해 보았다. 실제 데이터에 적용하여 분석한 결과, 사용자 신뢰 네트워크의 내향 중심성 지수를 조건 없이 적용한 경우에는 오히려 정확도의 감소만을 야기하는 것으로 나타났고, 일정 임계치 이상의 외향 중심성을 갖는 사용자에 한해 내향 중심성 지수를 고려한 추천 알고리즘은 전통적인 협업 필터링에 비해 약간의 정확도 개선이 이루어짐을 확인할 수 있었다. 아울러, 사용자 신뢰 네트워크를 기반으로 탐색하는 알고리즘이 가장 우수한 성능을 보이는 것을 알 수 있었으며, 전통적인 협업 필터링과 비교해서도 통계적으로 유의한 수준의 정확도의 개선이 이루어짐을 확인할 수 있었다. Among the techniques for recommendation, collaborative filtering (CF) is commonly recognized to be the most effective for implementing recommender systems. Until now, CF has been popularly studied and adopted in both academic and real-world applications. The basic idea of CF is to create recommendation results by finding correlations between users of a recommendation system. CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and recommend products to users by using other like-minded people's results of evaluation for each product. Thus, it is very important to compute evaluation similarities among users in CF because the recommendation quality depends on it. Typical CF uses user's explicit numeric ratings of items (i.e. quantitative information) when computing the similarities among users in CF. In other words, user's numeric ratings have been a sole source of user preference information in traditional CF. However, user ratings are unable to fully reflect user's actual preferences from time to time. According to several studies, users may more actively accommodate recommendation of reliable others when purchasing goods. Thus, trust relationship can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, we propose a new hybrid recommender system that fuses CF and social network analysis (SNA). The proposed system adopts the recommendation algorithm that additionally reflect the result analyzed by SNA. In detail, our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and trust relationship information between users when calculating user similarities. For this, our system creates and uses not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-to-user trust network. As the methods for calculating user similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is algorithm calculating the degree of similarity between users by utilizing in-degree and out-degree centrality, which are the indices representing the central location in the social network. We named these approaches as 'Trust CF - All' and 'Trust CF - Conditional'. The other alternative is the algorithm reflecting a neighbor's score higher when a target user trusts the neighbor directly or indirectly. The direct or indirect trust relationship can be identified by searching trust network of users. In this study, we call this approach 'Trust CF - Search'. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we used experimental data provided by LibRec that crawled from the entire FilmTrust website. It consists of ratings of movies and trust relationship network indicating who to trust between users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and UCINET 6. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared the performance of our proposed method with one of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender system were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). The analysis results confirmed that in case of applying without conditions the in-degree centrality index of trusted network of users(i.e. Trust CF - All), the accuracy (MAE = 0.565134) was lower than conventional CF (MAE = 0.564966). And, in case of applying the in-degree centrality index only to the users with the out-degree centrality above a certain threshold value(i.e. Trust CF - Conditional), the proposed system improved the accuracy a little (MAE = 0.564909) compared to traditional CF. However, the algorithm searching based on the trusted network of users (i.e. Trust CF - Search) was found to show the best performance (MAE = 0.564846). And the result from paired samples t-test presented that Trust CF - Search outperformed conventional CF with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of user's trust relationship network information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.