An Adaptive Social Network-Aware Collaborative Filtering Algorithm for Improved Rating Prediction Accuracy

When information from traditional recommender systems is augmented with information about user relationships that social networks store, more successful recommendations can be produced. However, this information regarding user relationships may not always be available, since some users may not consent to the use of their social network information for recommendations or may not have social network accounts at all. Moreover, the rating data (categories and characteristics of products) may be unavailable for a recommender system. In this paper, we present an algorithm that can be applied in any social network-aware recommender system that utilizes the users’ ratings on items and users’ social relations. The proposed algorithm addresses the issues of limited social network information or limited collaborative filtering information for some users by adapting its behavior, taking into account the density and utility of each user’s social network and collaborative filtering neighborhoods. Through this adaptation, the proposed algorithm achieves considerable improvement in rating prediction accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can be easily implemented in recommender systems.