Graph-based recommendations: Make the most out of social data

Abstract

Recommender systems use nowadays more and more data about users and items as part of the recommendation process. The availability of auxiliary data, going beyond the mere user/item data, has the potential to improve recommendations. In this work we examine the contribution of two types of social auxiliary data – namely, tags and friendship links – to the accuracy of a graph-based recommender. We measure the impact of the availability of auxiliary data on the recommendations using features extracted from both the auxiliary and the original data. The evaluation shows that the social auxiliary data improves the accuracy of the recommendations, and that the greatest improvement is achieved when graph features mirroring the nature of the auxiliary data are extracted by the recommender.