Distributed recommender system using multi-agent for social networks

Abstract

Social networks have become significant tools due to the vast and useful information existing in them. The social platforms also act as the storage of entered choices of millions of users for various applications such as political surveys, research studies, marketing product preferences and many more. Social network recommender systems exploit this information and direct users in selecting their choices. It is clear that recommender systems should be efficient enough to be able to process the huge magnitude of data that has been generated in recent years by social network users. This research proposes a foundation of an efficient and scalable recommender system to be able to process large amount of data (i.e. Big data) in a short amount of time. The main goal is providing scalability and efficiency of the recommender system. The simulation of the prototype of such a distributed recommender system by using multi-agent based technologies shows promising results. These prototypes provide recommendations to users about other users with the similar interests in online and distributed manner as real recommender systems. The agents can simulate users or can be used as the containers of algorithms for comparing the similarity between users by different approaches, such as cosine similarity and clustering methods for testing and examining real scenarios. To be able to test these prototypes in agent-based simulation environment an agent-based framework is developed. This framework has three modules named social network crawler, social network simulator and employed prototype of the distributed recommender system that use different text and data mining algorithms. Finally, newly developed performance metric (called Scalability Factor) is introduced that shows the minimum number of servers needed to be able to run the agent systems in parallel. This thesis shows using a distributed and parallel model for recommender systems is the key to increase the speed of recommendation convergence and as a result to provide scalability. Multi-agent based simulation results, coupled with numerical analysis affirm that the proposed solution provides scalability and efficiency for recommender systems.