Dual Implicit Mining-Based Latent Friend Recommendation

Abstract

The latent friend recommendation in online social media is interesting, yet challenging, because the user-item ratings and the user–user relationships are both sparse. In this paper, we propose a new dual implicit mining-based latent friend recommendation model that simultaneously considers the implicit interest topics of users and the implicit link relationships between the users in the local topic cliques. Specifically, we first propose an algorithm called all reviews from a user and all tags from their corresponding items to learn the implicit interest topics of the users and their corresponding topic weights, then compute the user interest topic similarity using a symmetric Jensen–Shannon divergence. After that, we adopt the proposed weighted local random walk with restart algorithm to analyze the implicit link relationships between the users in the local topic cliques and calculate the weighted link relationship similarity between the users. Combining the user interest topic similarity with the weighted link relationship similarity in a unified way, we get the final latent friend recommendation list. The experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art latent friend recommendation methods under four different types of evaluation metrics.