A Social Network-Based Recommender System (Snrs)
A Social Networ k-Based Recommender System (SNRS)
Jianming He and Wesley W. Chu Computer Science Department University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095 jmhek@cs.ucla.edu, wwc@cs.ucla.edu
Abstr act. Social influence plays an important role in product marketing. However, it has rarely been considered in traditional recommender systems. In this paper we present a new paradigm of recommender systems which can utilize information in social networks, including user preferences, item's general acceptance, and influence from social friends. A probabilistic model is developed to make personalized recommendations from such information. We extract data from a real online social network, and our analysis of this large dataset reveals that friends have a tendency to select the same items and give similar ratings. Experimental results on this dataset show that our proposed system not only improves the prediction accuracy of recommender systems but also remedies the data sparsity and coldstart issues inherent in collaborative filtering. Furthermore, we propose to improve the performance of our system by applying semantic filtering of social networks, and validate its improvement via a class project experiment. In this experiment we demonstrate how relevant friends can be selected for inference based on the semantics of friend relationships and finer-grained user ratings. Such technologies can be deployed by most content providers.
1 Intr oduction
In order to overcome information overload, recommender systems have become a key tool for providing users with personalized recommendations on items such as movies, music, books, news, and web pages. Intrigued by many practical applications, researchers have developed algorithms and systems over the last decade. Some of them have been commercialized by online venders such as Amazon.com, Netflix.com, and IMDb.com. These systems predict user preferences (often represented as numeric ratings) for new items based on the user's
Jianming He and Wesley W. Chu Computer Science Department University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095 jmhek@cs.ucla.edu, wwc@cs.ucla.edu
Abstr act. Social influence plays an important role in product marketing. However, it has rarely been considered in traditional recommender systems. In this paper we present a new paradigm of recommender systems which can utilize information in social networks, including user preferences, item's general acceptance, and influence from social friends. A probabilistic model is developed to make personalized recommendations from such information. We extract data from a real online social network, and our analysis of this large dataset reveals that friends have a tendency to select the same items and give similar ratings. Experimental results on this dataset show that our proposed system not only improves the prediction accuracy of recommender systems but also remedies the data sparsity and coldstart issues inherent in collaborative filtering. Furthermore, we propose to improve the performance of our system by applying semantic filtering of social networks, and validate its improvement via a class project experiment. In this experiment we demonstrate how relevant friends can be selected for inference based on the semantics of friend relationships and finer-grained user ratings. Such technologies can be deployed by most content providers.
1 Intr oduction
In order to overcome information overload, recommender systems have become a key tool for providing users with personalized recommendations on items such as movies, music, books, news, and web pages. Intrigued by many practical applications, researchers have developed algorithms and systems over the last decade. Some of them have been commercialized by online venders such as Amazon.com, Netflix.com, and IMDb.com. These systems predict user preferences (often represented as numeric ratings) for new items based on the user's