Improving Context Aware Recommendation Performance by Using Social Networks

Abstract

Ecommerce systems employ recommender systems to enhance the customer loyalty and hence increasing the cross-selling of products. In collaborative filtering - as the most popular method in recommender systems - an implicit network is formed among all the people. In any network, there are some individuals who have some inspirational power over the others leading them to influence their decisions and behaviours. But it seems that these methods do not support context awareness in mobile commerce environments. Furthermore, they lack high accuracy and also require high volume of computations due to not distinguish between neighbours as a friend or a stranger. This paper proposes a new model for recommender systems which are based on mobile data. This model uses these data to extract current users' context and also to identify individuals with the highest influence. Then, the system uses the information of these identified impressive users in the current context existed in the social networks for making recommendations. Beside of achieving higher accuracy, the proposed model has resolved cold start problem in collaborative filtering systems.