TrustWalker: a random walk model for combining trust-based and item-based recommendation

Collaborative filtering is the most popular approach to build recommender systems and has been successfully employed in many applications. However, it cannot make recommendations for so-called cold start users that have rated only a very small number of items. In addition, these methods do not know how confident they are in their recommendations. Trust-based recommendation methods assume the additional knowledge of a trust network among users and can better deal with cold start users, since users only need to be simply connected to the trust network. On the other hand, the sparsity of the user item ratings forces the trustbased approach to consider ratings of indirect neighbors that are only weakly trusted, which may decrease its precision. In order to find a good trade-off, we propose a random walk model combining the trust-based and the collaborative filtering approach for recommendation. The random walk model allows us to define and to measure the confidence of a recommendation. We...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Mohsen Jamali, Martin Ester
• Keywords: Cold Start Users, Collaborative Filtering Approach, Data Mining, KDD 2009, Random Walk Model