Study on Tag, Trust and Probability Matrix Factorization Based Social Network Recommendation

In recent years, social network related applications such as WeChat, Facebook, Twitter and so on, have attracted hundreds of millions of people to share their experience, plan or organize, and attend social events with friends. In these operations, plenty of valuable information is accumulated, which makes an innovative approach to explore users' preference and overcome challenges in traditional recommender systems. Based on the study of the existing social network recommendation methods, we find there is an abundant information that can be incorporated into probability matrix factorization (PMF) model to handle challenges such as data sparsity in many recommender systems. Therefore, the research put forward a unified social network recommendation framework that combine tags, trust between users, ratings with PMF. The uniformed method is based on three existing recommendation models (SoRecUser, SoRecItem and SoRec), and the complexity analysis indicates that our approach has good effectiveness and can be applied to large-scale datasets. Furthermore, experimental results on publicly available Last.fin dataset show that our method outperforms the existing state-of-art social network recommendation approaches, measured by MAE and MRSE in different data sparse conditions.