An effective social recommendation method based on user reputation model and rating profile enhancement

Trust-aware recommender systems are advanced approaches which have been developed based on social information to provide relevant suggestions to users. These systems can alleviate cold start and data sparsity problems in recommendation methods through trust relations. However, the lack of sufficient trust information can reduce the efficiency of these methods. Moreover, diversity and novelty are important measures for providing more attractive suggestions to users. In this article, a reputation-based approach is proposed to improve trust-aware recommender systems by enhancing rating profiles of the users who have insufficient ratings and trust information. In particular, we use a user reliability measure to determine the effectiveness of the rating profiles and trust networks of users in predicting unseen items. Then, a novel user reputation model is introduced based on the combination of the rating profiles and trust networks. The main idea of the proposed method is to enhance the rating profiles of the users who have low user reliability measure by adding a number of virtual ratings. To this end, the proposed user reputation model is used to predict the virtual ratings. In addition, the diversity, novelty and reliability measures of items are considered in the proposed rating profile enhancement mechanism. Therefore, the proposed method can improve the recommender systems about the cold start and data sparsity problems and also the diversity, novelty and reliability measures. Experimental results based on three real-world datasets show that the proposed method achieves higher performance than other recommendation methods.