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
