Recommending scientific datasets using author networks in ensemble methods

Abstract

Open access to datasets is increasingly driving modern science. Consequently, discovering such datasets is becoming an important functionality for scientists in many different fields. We investigate methods for dataset recommendation: the task of recommending relevant datasets given a dataset that is already known to be relevant. Previous work has used meta-data descriptions of datasets and interest profiles of authors to support dataset recommendation. In this work, we are the first to investigate the use of co-author networks to drive the recommendation of relevant datasets. We also investigate the combination of such co-author networks with existing methods, resulting in three different algorithms for dataset recommendation. We obtain experimental results on a realistic corpus which show that only the ensemble combination of all three algorithms achieves sufficiently high precision for the dataset recommendation task.