Exploiting the user social context to address neighborhood bias in collaborative filtering music recommender systems

Abstract

Recent research in the field of recommender systems focuses on the incorporation of social information into collaborative filtering methods to improve the reliability of recommendations. Social networks enclose valuable data regarding user behavior and connections that can be exploited in this area to infer knowledge about user preferences and social influence. The fact that streaming music platforms have some social functionalities also allows this type of information to be used for music recommendation. In this work, we take advantage of the friendship structure to address a type of recommendation bias derived from the way collaborative filtering methods compute the neighborhood. These methods restrict the rating predictions for a user to the items that have been rated by their nearest neighbors while leaving out other items that might be of his/her interest. This problem is different from the popularity bias caused by the power-law distribution of the item rating frequency (long-tail), well-known in the music domain, although both shortcomings can be related. Our proposal is based on extending and diversifying the neighborhood by capturing trust and homophily effects between users through social structure metrics. The results show an increase in potentially recommendable items while reducing recommendation error rates.