User structural information in priority-based ranking for top-N recommendation

Abstract

The recommender system is a set of data recovery tools and techniques used to recommend items to users based on their selection. To improve the accuracy of the recommendation, the use of additional information (e.g., social information, trust, item tags, etc.) in addition to user-item ranking data has been an active area of research for the past decade. In this paper, we present a new method for recommending top-N items, which uses structural information and trust among users within the social network and extracts the implicit connections between users and uses them in the item recommendation process. The proposed method has seven main steps: (1) extract items liked by neighbors, (ii) constructing item features for neighbors, (iii) extract embedding trust features for neighbors, (iv) create user-feature matrix, (v) calculate user’s priority, (vi) calculate item’s priority and finally, (vii) recommend top-N items. We implement the proposed method with three datasets for recommendations. We compare our results with some advanced ranking methods and observe that the accuracy of our method for all users and cold-start users improves. Our method can also create more items for cold-start users in the list of recommended items.