SoCo: a social network aided context-aware recommender system

  • Authors:
  • Xin Liu;Karl Aberer

  • Affiliations:
  • ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FÉDÉRALE DE LAUSANNE, Lausanne, Switzerland;ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FÉDÉRALE DE LAUSANNE, Lausanne, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Contexts and social network information have been proven to be valuable information for building accurate recommender system. However, to the best of our knowledge, no existing works systematically combine diverse types of such information to further improve recommendation quality. In this paper, we propose SoCo, a novel context-aware recommender system incorporating elaborately processed social network information. We handle contextual information by applying random decision trees to partition the original user-item-rating matrix such that the ratings with similar contexts are grouped. Matrix factorization is then employed to predict missing preference of a user for an item using the partitioned matrix. In order to incorporate social network information, we introduce an additional social regularization term to the matrix factorization objective function to infer a user's preference for an item by learning opinions from his/her friends who are expected to share similar tastes. A context-aware version of Pearson Correlation Coefficient is proposed to measure user similarity. Real datasets based experiments show that SoCo improves the performance (in terms of root mean square error) of the state-of-the-art context-aware recommender system and social recommendation model by 15.7% and 12.2% respectively.