Predicting people who other people may like has recently become an important task in many online social networks. Traditional collaborative filtering (CF) approaches are popular in recommender systems to effectively predict user preferences for items. One major problem in CF is computing similarity between users or items. Traditional CF methods often use heuristic methods to combine the ratings given to an item by similar users, which may not reflect the characteristics of the active user and can give unsatisfactory performance. In contrast to heuristic approaches we have developed CollabNet, a novel algorithm that uses gradient descent to learn the relative contributions of similar users or items to the ranking of recommendations produced by a recommender system, using weights to represent the contributions of similar users for each active user. We have applied CollabNet to the challenging problem of people to people recommendation in social networks, where people have a dual role as both "users" and "items", e.g., both initiating and receiving communications, to recommend other users to a given user, based on user similarity in terms of both taste (whom they like) and attractiveness (who likes them). Evaluation of CollabNet recommendations on datasets from a commercial online social network shows improved performance over standard CF.

Item Type:	Refereed Conference Paper
Keywords:	recommender systems, social network analysis
Research Division:	Information and Computing Sciences
Research Group:	Artificial intelligence
Research Field:	Artificial intelligence not elsewhere classified
Objective Division:	Information and Communication Services
Objective Group:	Information systems, technologies and services
Objective Field:	Application software packages
UTAS Author:	Kim, YS (Dr Yang Kim)
ID Code:	94647
Year Published:	2010
Deposited By:	Information and Communication Technology
Deposited On:	2014-09-15
Last Modified:	2015-02-13
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