24,791 research outputs found
Personalized Recommendations Based On Users’ Information-Centered Social Networks
The overwhelming amount of information available today makes it difficult for users to find useful information and as the solution to this information glut problem, recommendation technologies emerged. Among the several streams of related research, one important evolution in technology is to generate recommendations based on users’ own social networks. The idea to take advantage of users’ social networks as a foundation for their personalized recommendations evolved from an Internet trend that is too important to neglect – the explosive growth of online social networks. In spite of the widely available and diversified assortment of online social networks, most recent social network-based recommendations have concentrated on limited kinds of online sociality (i.e., trust-based networks and online friendships). Thus, this study tried to prove the expandability of social network-based recommendations to more diverse and less focused social networks. The online social networks considered in this dissertation include: 1) a watching network, 2) a group membership, and 3) an academic collaboration network. Specifically, this dissertation aims to check the value of users’ various online social connections as information sources and to explore how to include them as a foundation for personalized recommendations.
In our results, users in online social networks shared similar interests with their social partners. An in-depth analysis about the shared interests indicated that online social networks have significant value as a useful information source. Through the recommendations generated by the preferences of social connection, the feasibility of users’ social connections as a useful information source was also investigated comprehensively. The social network-based recommendations produced as good as, or sometimes better, suggestions than traditional collaborative filtering recommendations. Social network-based recommendations were also a good solution for the cold-start user problem. Therefore, in order for cold-start users to receive reasonably good recommendations, it is more effective to be socially associated with other users, rather than collecting a few more items. To conclude, this study demonstrates the viability of multiple social networks as a means for gathering useful information and addresses how different social networks of a novelty value can improve upon conventional personalization technology
Utilizing Online Social Network and Location-Based Data to Recommend Products and Categories in Online Marketplaces
Recent research has unveiled the importance of online social networks for
improving the quality of recommender systems and encouraged the research
community to investigate better ways of exploiting the social information for
recommendations. To contribute to this sparse field of research, in this paper
we exploit users' interactions along three data sources (marketplace, social
network and location-based) to assess their performance in a barely studied
domain: recommending products and domains of interests (i.e., product
categories) to people in an online marketplace environment. To that end we
defined sets of content- and network-based user similarity features for each
data source and studied them isolated using an user-based Collaborative
Filtering (CF) approach and in combination via a hybrid recommender algorithm,
to assess which one provides the best recommendation performance.
Interestingly, in our experiments conducted on a rich dataset collected from
SecondLife, a popular online virtual world, we found that recommenders relying
on user similarity features obtained from the social network data clearly
yielded the best results in terms of accuracy in case of predicting products,
whereas the features obtained from the marketplace and location-based data
sources also obtained very good results in case of predicting categories. This
finding indicates that all three types of data sources are important and should
be taken into account depending on the level of specialization of the
recommendation task.Comment: 20 pages book chapte
Reciprocal Recommendation System for Online Dating
Online dating sites have become popular platforms for people to look for
potential romantic partners. Different from traditional user-item
recommendations where the goal is to match items (e.g., books, videos, etc)
with a user's interests, a recommendation system for online dating aims to
match people who are mutually interested in and likely to communicate with each
other. We introduce similarity measures that capture the unique features and
characteristics of the online dating network, for example, the interest
similarity between two users if they send messages to same users, and
attractiveness similarity if they receive messages from same users. A
reciprocal score that measures the compatibility between a user and each
potential dating candidate is computed and the recommendation list is generated
to include users with top scores. The performance of our proposed
recommendation system is evaluated on a real-world dataset from a major online
dating site in China. The results show that our recommendation algorithms
significantly outperform previously proposed approaches, and the collaborative
filtering-based algorithms achieve much better performance than content-based
algorithms in both precision and recall. Our results also reveal interesting
behavioral difference between male and female users when it comes to looking
for potential dates. In particular, males tend to be focused on their own
interest and oblivious towards their attractiveness to potential dates, while
females are more conscientious to their own attractiveness to the other side of
the line
Recommender Systems
The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity
of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information.
Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of
communities including social and computer scientists, physicists, and
interdisciplinary researchers. Despite substantial theoretical and practical
achievements, unification and comparison of different approaches are lacking,
which impedes further advances. In this article, we review recent developments
in recommender systems and discuss the major challenges. We compare and
evaluate available algorithms and examine their roles in the future
developments. In addition to algorithms, physical aspects are described to
illustrate macroscopic behavior of recommender systems. Potential impacts and
future directions are discussed. We emphasize that recommendation has a great
scientific depth and combines diverse research fields which makes it of
interests for physicists as well as interdisciplinary researchers.Comment: 97 pages, 20 figures (To appear in Physics Reports
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