Recommendation plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Recommender systems automatically suggest items to users that might be interesting for them. Recent studies illustrate that incorporating social trust in Matrix Factorization methods demonstrably improves accuracy of rating prediction. Such approaches mainly use the trust scores explicitly expressed by users. However, it is often challenging to have users provide explicit trust scores of each other. There exist quite a few works, which propose Trust Metrics to compute and predict trust scores between users based on their interactions. In this paper, first we present how social relation can be extracted from users' ratings to items by describing Hellinger distance between users in recommender systems. Then, we propose to incorporate the predicted trust scores into social matrix factorization models. By analyzing social relation extraction from three well-known real-world datasets, which both: trust and recommendation data available, we conclude that using the implicit social relation in social recommendation techniques has almost the same performance compared to the actual trust scores explicitly expressed by users. Hence, we build our method, called Hell-TrustSVD, on top of the state-of-the-art social recommendation technique to incorporate both the extracted implicit social relations and ratings given by users on the prediction of items for an active user. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to extend TrustSVD with extracted social trust information. The experimental results support the idea of employing implicit trust into matrix factorization whenever explicit trust is not available, can perform much better than the state-of-the-art approaches in user rating prediction.
@cite_8: Collaborative filtering inherently suffers from the data sparsity and cold start problems. Social networks have been shown useful to help alleviate these issues. However, social connections may not be available in many real systems, whereas implicit item relationships are lack of study. In this paper, we propose a novel matrix factorization model by taking into account implicit item relationships. Specifically, we employ an adapted association rule technique to reveal implicit item relationships in terms of item-to-item and group-to-item associations, which are then used to regularize the generation of low-rank user- and item-feature matrices. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach against other counterparts.
@cite_49: We propose TrustSVD, a trust-based matrix factorization technique for recommendations. TrustSVD integrates multiple information sources into the recommendation model in order to reduce the data sparsity and cold start problems and their degradation of recommendation performance. An analysis of social trust data from four real-world data sets suggests that not only the explicit but also the implicit influence of both ratings and trust should be taken into consideration in a recommendation model. TrustSVD therefore builds on top of a state-of-the-art recommendation algorithm, SVD++ (which uses the explicit and implicit influence of rated items), by further incorporating both the explicit and implicit influence of trusted and trusting users on the prediction of items for an active user. The proposed technique is the first to extend SVD++ with social trust information. Experimental results on the four data sets demonstrate that TrustSVD achieves better accuracy than other ten counterparts recommendation techniques.
@cite_39: As the Netflix Prize competition has demonstrated, matrix factorization models are superior to classic nearest neighbor techniques for producing product recommendations, allowing the incorporation of additional information such as implicit feedback, temporal effects, and confidence levels.
There are two main recommendation tasks in recommender systems, namely item recommendation and rating prediction, and our work focuses on the rating prediction task. Matrix factorization technique, because of achieving higher accuracy and better alleviate the data sparsity issue, is a widely-used recommendation method in model-based CF @cite_39 . Trust-aware model-based MF approaches assume that users' preferences are similar to or influenced by their trusted users @cite_49 . The intuition behind is that social friends share similar preferences and influence each other by recommending items. It has been shown that such additional side information among users is useful to deal with the concerned issues and thus to improve recommendation performance @cite_8 .