Using a Social-Based Collaborative Filtering with Classification Techniques

In this paper, a social-based collaborative filtering model named SBCF is proposed to make personalized recommendations of friends in a social networking context. The social information is formalized and combined with the collaborative filtering algorithm. Furthermore, in order to optimize the performance of the recommendation process, two classification techniques are used: an unsupervised technique applied initially to all users using the Incremental K-means algorithm and a supervised technique applied to newly added users using the K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm (K-NN). Based on the proposed approach, a prototype of a recommender system is developed and a set of experiments has been conducted using the Yelp database.