Trust-Networks in Recommender Systems

Similarity-based recommender systems suffer from significant limitations, such as data sparseness and scalability. The goal of this research is to improve recommender systems by incorporating the social concepts of trust and reputation. By introducing a trust model we can improve the quality and accuracy of the recommended items. Three trust-based recommendation strategies are presented and evaluated against the popular MovieLens [8] dataset

Job Seekers\u27 Acceptance of Job Recommender Systems: Results of an Empirical Study

Based on UTAUT2 and the importance of trust to explain user behavior in relation to recommender systems, we focus on job recommender systems by developing and validating a job recommender system acceptance model. The results of our empirical, survey-based study with 440 job seekers indicate that beside performance expectancy and habit, trust is among the three most important determinants and it is especially relevant for women, passive job seekers and those without experience in using job recommender systems. The paper extends general trust and recommender system research by revealing three moderators for the trust and intention relationship. It contextualizes the UTAUT2 by incorporating trust as an antecedent of a consumer’s intention to use and by revealing three moderating effects for this relationship. Hence, it is the basis for further studies investigating the acceptance of job recommender system, which has rather been neglected by prior research

Trust- and Distrust-Based Recommendations for Controversial Reviews

Recommender systems that incorporate a social trust network among their users have the potential to make more personalized recommendations compared to traditional collaborative filtering systems, provided they succeed in utilizing the additional trust and distrust information to their advantage. We compare the performance of several well-known trust-enhanced techniques for recommending controversial reviews from Epinions.com, and provide the first experimental study of using distrust in the recommendation process

Applying trust metrics based on user interactions to recommendation in social networks

Recommender systems have been strongly researched within the last decade. With the arising and popularization of digital social networks a new field has been opened for social recommendations. Considering the network topology, users interactions, or estimating trust between users are some of the new strategies that recommender systems can take into account in order to adapt their techniques to these new scenarios. We introduce MarkovTrust, a way to infer trust from Twitter interactions and to compute trust between distant users. MarkovTrust is based on Markov chains, which makes it simple to be implemented and computationally efficient. We study the properties of this trust metric and study its application in a recommender system of tweets.Postprint (published version

Extracting Implicit Social Relation for Social Recommendation Techniques in User Rating Prediction

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

Trust based collaborative filtering

k-nearest neighbour (kNN) collaborative filtering (CF), the widely successful algorithm supporting recommender systems, attempts to relieve the problem of information overload by generating predicted ratings for items users have not expressed their opinions about; to do so, each predicted rating is computed based on ratings given by like-minded individuals. Like-mindedness, or similarity-based recommendation, is the cause of a variety of problems that plague recommender systems. An alternative view of the problem, based on trust, offers the potential to address many of the previous limiations in CF. In this work we present a varation of kNN, the trusted k-nearest recommenders (or kNR) algorithm, which allows users to learn who and how much to trust one another by evaluating the utility of the rating information they receive. This method redefines the way CF is performed, and while avoiding some of the pitfalls that similarity-based CF is prone to, outperforms the basic similarity-based methods in terms of prediction accuracy

RED: a Rich Epinions Dataset for Recommender Systems

Recommender Systems require speci c datasets to evaluate their approach. They do not require the same information: descriptions of users or items or users interactions may be necessary, which is not gathered in today datasets. In this paper, we provide a dataset containing reviews from users on items, trust values between users, items category, categories hierarchy and users expertise on categories. This dataset can be used to evaluate various Recommender Systems using Collaborative Filtering, Content-Based or Trust-Based