Recommendations based on social links

The goal of this chapter is to give an overview of recent works on the development of social link-based recommender systems and to offer insights on related issues, as well as future directions for research. Among several kinds of social recommendations, this chapter focuses on recommendations, which are based on users’ self-defined (i.e., explicit) social links and suggest items, rather than people of interest. The chapter starts by reviewing the needs for social link-based recommendations and studies that explain the viability of social networks as useful information sources. Following that, the core part of the chapter dissects and examines modern research on social link-based recommendations along several dimensions. It concludes with a discussion of several important issues and future directions for social link-based recommendation research

Improving the Performance of Recommendation on Social Network by Investigating Interactions of Trust and Interest Similarity

On the social media, lots of people share their experiences through various factors like blogs, online ratings, reviews, online polling and tweets. Study shows that the factors such as interpersonal interest and interpersonal influence from the social media which is based on the circles as well as groups of friends leads to opportunities and challenges in solving the problems on datasets. This challenge is for the Recommender System (RS) to find the solution on cold start and sparsity problems. In this paper, on the basis of the probabilistic matrix factorization, the social factors like personal interest, interpersonal influence and interpersonal interest similarity are combined into a unified personalized recommendation model. These factors can improve the associating linkage in latent space. Various datasets are used to conduct the experiments to get the results that show that the proposed model performs better than the existing approaches

IMPROVING COLLABORATIVE FILTERING RECOMMENDER BY USING MULTI-CRITERIA RATING AND IMPLICIT SOCIAL NETWORKS TO RECOMMEND RESEARCH PAPERS

Research paper recommender systems (RSs) aim to alleviate the information overload of researchers by suggesting relevant and useful papers. The collaborative filtering in the area of recommending research papers can benefit by using richer user feedback data through multi-criteria rating, and by integrating richer social network data into the recommender algorithm. Existing approaches using collaborative filtering or hybrid approaches typically allow only one rating criterion (overall liking) for users to evaluate papers. We conducted a qualitative study using focus group to explore the most important criteria for rating research papers that can be used to control the paper recommendation by enabling users to set the weight for each criterion. We investigated also the effect of using different rating criteria on the user interface design and how the user can control the weight of the criteria. We followed that by a quantitative study using a questionnaire to validate our findings from the focus group and to find if the chosen criteria are domain independent. Combining social network information with collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms has successfully reduced some of the drawbacks of collaborative filtering and increased the accuracy of recommendations. All existing recommendation approaches that combine social network information with collaborative filtering in this domain have used explicit social relations that are initiated by users (e.g. “friendship”, “following”). The results have shown that the recommendations produced using explicit social relations cannot compete with traditional collaborative filtering and suffer from the low user coverage. We argue that the available data in social bookmarking Web sites can be exploited to connect similar users using implicit social connections based on their bookmarking behavior. We explore the implicit social relations between users in social bookmarking Web sites (such as CiteULike and Mendeley), and propose three different implicit social networks to recommend relevant papers to users: readership, co-readership and tag-based implicit social networks. First, for each network, we tested the interest similarities of users who are connected using the proposed implicit social networks and compare them with the interest similarities using two explicit social networks: co-authorship and friendship. We found that the readership implicit social network connects users with more similarities than users who are connected using co-authorship and friendship explicit social networks. Then, we compare the recommendation using three different recommendation approaches and implicit social network alone with the recommendation using implicit and explicit social network. We found that fusing recommendation from implicit and explicit social networks can increase the prediction accuracy, and user coverage. The trade-off between the prediction accuracy and diversity was also studied with different social distances between users. The results showed that the diversity of the recommended list increases with the increase of social distance. To summarize, the main contributions of this dissertation to the area of research paper recommendation are two-fold. It is the first to explore the use of multi-criteria rating for research papers. Secondly, it proposes and evaluates a novel approach to improve collaborative filtering in both prediction accuracy (performance) and user coverage and diversity (nonperformance measures) in social bookmarking systems for sharing research papers, by defining and exploiting several implicit social networks from usage data that is widely available

Trust-based algorithms for fusing crowdsourced estimates of continuous quantities

Crowdsourcing has provided a viable way of gathering information at unprecedented volumes and speed by engaging individuals to perform simple micro–tasks. In particular, the crowdsourcing paradigm has been successfully applied to participatory sensing, in which the users perform sensing tasks and provide data using their mobile devices. In this way, people can help solve complex environmental sensing tasks, such as weather monitoring, nuclear radiation monitoring and cell tower mapping, in a highly decentralised and parallelised fashion. Traditionally, crowdsourcing technologies were primarily used for gathering data for classifications and image labelling tasks. In contrast, such crowd–based participatory sensing poses new challenges that relate to (i) dealing with human–reported sensor data that are available in the form of continuous estimates of an observed quantity such as a location, a temperature or a sound reading, (ii) dealing with possible spatial and temporal correlations within the data and (ii) issues of data trustworthiness due to the unknown capabilities and incentives of the participants and their devices. Solutions to these challenges need to be able to combine the data provided by multiple users to ensure the accuracy and the validity of the aggregated results. With this in mind, our goal is to provide methods to better aid the aggregation process of crowd–reported sensor estimates of continuous quantities when data are provided by individuals of varying trustworthiness. To achieve this, we develop a trust–based in- formation fusion framework that incorporates latent trustworthiness traits of the users within the data fusion process. Through this framework, we develop a set of four novel algorithms (MaxTrust, BACE, TrustGP and TrustLGCP) to compute reliable aggregations of the users’ reports in both the settings of observing a stationary quantity (Max- Trust and BACE) and a spatially distributed phenomenon (TrustGP and TrustLGCP). The key feature of all these algorithm is the ability of (i) learning the trustworthiness of each individual who provide the data and (ii) exploit this latent user’s trustworthiness information to compute a more accurate fused estimate. In particular, this is achieved by using a probabilistic framework that allows our methods to simultaneously learn the fused estimate and the users’ trustworthiness from the crowd reports. We validate our algorithms in four key application areas (cell tower mapping, WiFi networks mapping, nuclear radiation monitoring and disaster response) that demonstrate the practical impact of our framework to achieve substantially more accurate and informative predictions compared to the existing fusion methods. We expect that results of this thesis will allow to build more reliable data fusion algorithms for the broad class of human–centred information systems (e.g., recommendation systems, peer reviewing systems, student grading tools) that are based on making decisions upon subjective opinions provided by their users