Recommendation in reciprocal and bipartite social networks - A case study of online dating

Abstract

Many social networks in our daily life are bipartite networks that are built on reciprocity. How can we recommend users/friends to a user, so that the user is interested in and attractive to recommended users? In this research, we propose a new collaborative filtering model to improve user recommendations in reciprocal and bipartite social networks. The model considers a user's "taste" in picking others and "attractiveness" in being picked by others. A case study of an online dating network shows that the new model outperforms a baseline collaborative filtering model on recommending both initial contacts and reciprocal contacts. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.