Estimating Trust Strength For Supporting Effective Recommendation Services

In the age of information explosion, Internet facilitates product searching and collecting much more convenient for users. However, it is time-consuming and exhausting for users to deal with large amounts of product information. In response, various recommendation approaches have been developed to recommend products that match users’ preferences and requirements. In addition to the well-known collaborative filtering recommendation approach, the trust-based recommendation approach is the emerging one. The reason is that most of online communities allow users to express their trust on other users. Based on the analysis of trust relationships, the trust-based recommendation approach finds out and consults the opinions of more reliable users and therefore makes better recommendations. Existing trust-based recommendation techniques consider all trust relationships in a given trust network equally important and give them the same trust strength. However, in a real-world setting, trust relationships may be of various strengths. In response, in this study, we propose a mechanism for trust strength estimation on the basis of the machine learning approach and estimate the trust strength for each existing trust relationship in a given trust network. To overcome the sparsity of the trust network, we also develop a modified trust propagation method to expand the original trust network. Finally, we perform a series of experiments to demonstrate the performance of our trust-based recommendation approach based on the trust strength estimation mechanism. Our empirical evaluation results show that our proposed approach outperforms our benchmark techniques, i.e., the traditional collaborative filtering approach and the original trust-based one

Analysing and using subjective criteria to improve dental care recommendation systems

Online reviews and rating sites are shaping industries as the users rely on recommendations given by former consumers and sharing opinions on the web. Dentistry has also been impacted by dental patients' reviews. This paper classifies trust-related information for dental care recommendations onto 4 categories: context, relationship, reputation and subjective criteria. It discusses each category and describes how they help focussing on trust when matching patients and dentists in brief. The paper then focuses on subjective criteria and presents the results of a survey aimed at showing trustrelated information emerged from subjective characteristics. Traits of personalities are used as subjective characteristics of patients and that of dentists are derived from the online patients' reviews. 580 Australian patients were surveyed to determine what factors affect their decision to find the trusted dentist. Subjective characteristics of dentists such as dentists' qualities and experienced dentists are considered the most important factors after location and cost. The most preferred dentists' qualities by almost all types of personalities are experienced, professional and quality of service. When the patients are further classified based on levels of fear, their preferences for dentists' qualities changed. Subjective qualities of both patients and dentists are important factors to improve the matching capability for the dental care recommendation systems

The use of machine learning algorithms in recommender systems: A systematic review

The final publication is available at Elsevier via https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2017.12.020 © 2018. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Recommender systems use algorithms to provide users with product or service recommendations. Recently, these systems have been using machine learning algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence. However, choosing a suitable machine learning algorithm for a recommender system is difficult because of the number of algorithms described in the literature. Researchers and practitioners developing recommender systems are left with little information about the current approaches in algorithm usage. Moreover, the development of recommender systems using machine learning algorithms often faces problems and raises questions that must be resolved. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature that analyzes the use of machine learning algorithms in recommender systems and identifies new research opportunities. The goals of this study are to (i) identify trends in the use or research of machine learning algorithms in recommender systems; (ii) identify open questions in the use or research of machine learning algorithms; and (iii) assist new researchers to position new research activity in this domain appropriately. The results of this study identify existing classes of recommender systems, characterize adopted machine learning approaches, discuss the use of big data technologies, identify types of machine learning algorithms and their application domains, and analyzes both main and alternative performance metrics.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Ontario Research Fund of the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Scienc