A social recommendation method based on an adaptive neighbor selection mechanism

Abstract Recommender systems are techniques to make personalized recommendations of items to users. In e-commerce sites and online sharing communities, providing high quality recommendations is an important issue which can help the users to make effective decisions to select a set of items. Collaborative filtering is an important type of the recommender systems that produces user specific recommendations of the items based on the patterns of ratings or usage (e.g. purchases). However, the quality of predicted ratings and neighbor selection for the users are important problems in the recommender systems. Selecting suitable neighbors set for the users leads to improve the accuracy of ratings prediction in recommendation process. In this paper, a novel social recommendation method is proposed which is based on an adaptive neighbor selection mechanism. In the proposed method first of all, initial neighbors set of the users is calculated using clustering algorithm. In this step, the combination of historical ratings and social information between the users are used to form initial neighbors set for the users. Then, these neighbor sets are used to predict initial ratings of the unseen items. Moreover, the quality of the initial predicted ratings is evaluated using a reliability measure which is based on the historical ratings and social information between the users. Then, a confidence model is proposed to remove useless users from the initial neighbors of the users and form a new adapted neighbors set for the users. Finally, new ratings of the unseen items are predicted using the new adapted neighbors set of the users and the t o p _ N interested items are recommended to the active user. Experimental results on three real-world datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art recommendation methods.