Social influence-based personal latent factors learning for effective recommendation

Abstract

Social recommendation has become an important technique of various online commerce platforms, which aims to predict the user preference based on the social network and the interactive network. Social recommendation, which can naturally integrate social information and interactive structure, has been demonstrated to be powerful in solving data sparsity and cold-start problems. Although some of the existing methods have been proven effective, the following two insights are often neglected. First, except for the explicit connections, social information contains implicit connections, e.g., indirect social relations. Indirect social relations can effectively improve the quality of recommendation when users only have few direct social relations. Second, the strength of social influence between users is different. In other words, users have different degrees of trust in different friends. These insights motivate us to propose a novel social recommendation model SIER (short for Social Influence-based Effective Recommendation) in this paper, which incorporates interactive information and social information into personal latent factors learning for social influence-based recommendation. Specifically, user preferences are captured in behavior history and social relations, i.e., user latent factors are shared in interactive network and social network. In particular, we utilize an overlapping community detection method to sufficiently capture the implicit relations in the social network. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.