Trust-aware recommender systems

Abstract

Recommender Systems based on Collaborative Filtering suggest to users items they might like. However due to data sparsity of the input ratings matrix, the step of finding similar users often fails. We propose to replace this step with the use of a trust metric, an algorithm able to propagate trust over the trust network and to estimate a trust weight that can be used in place of the similarity weight. An empirical evaluation on Epinions.com dataset shows that Recommender Systems that make use of trust information are the most effective in term of accuracy while preserving a good coverage. This is especially evident on users who provided few ratings. Copyright 2007 ACM.