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

Accumulative time-based ranking method to reputation evaluation in information networks

With the rapid development of modern technology, the Web has become an important platform for users to make friends and acquire information. However, since information on the Web is over-abundant, information filtering becomes a key task for online users to obtain relevant suggestions. As most Websites can be ranked according to users' rating and preferences, relevance to queries, and recency, how to extract the most relevant item from the over-abundant information is always a key topic for researchers in various fields. In this paper, we adopt tools used to analyze complex networks to evaluate user reputation and item quality. In our proposed accumulative time-based ranking (ATR) algorithm, we incorporate two behavioral weighting factors which are updated when users select or rate items, to reflect the evolution of user reputation and item quality over time. We showed that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art ranking algorithms in terms of precision and robustness on empirical datasets from various online retailers and the citation datasets among research publications

Identifying online user reputation of user–object bipartite networks

Identifying online user reputation based on the rating information of the user–object bipartite networks is important for understanding online user collective behaviors. Based on the Bayesian analysis, we present a parameter-free algorithm for ranking online user reputation, where the user reputation is calculated based on the probability that their ratings are consistent with the main part of all user opinions. The experimental results show that the AUC values of the presented algorithm could reach 0.8929 and 0.8483 for the MovieLens and Netflix data sets, respectively, which is better than the results generated by the CR and IARR methods. Furthermore, the experimental results for different user groups indicate that the presented algorithm outperforms the iterative ranking methods in both ranking accuracy and computation complexity. Moreover, the results for the synthetic networks show that the computation complexity of the presented algorithm is a linear function of the network size, which suggests that the presented algorithm is very effective and efficient for the large scale dynamic online systems