Recommender System using Implicit Trust-enhanced Collaborative Filtering

Abstract

Personalization aims to provide customized contents to each user by using the user’s personal preferences. In this sense, the core parts of personalization are regarded as recommendation technologies, which can recommend the proper contents or products to each user according to his/her preference. Prior studies have proposed novel recommendation technologies because they recognized the importance of recommender systems. Among several recommendation technologies, collaborative filtering (CF) has been actively studied and applied in real-world applications. The CF, however, often suffers sparsity or scalability problems. Prior research also recognized the importance of these two problems and therefore proposed many solutions. Many prior studies, however, suffered from problems, such as requiring additional time and cost for solving the limitations by utilizing additional information from other sources besides the existing user-item matrix. This study proposes a novel implicit rating approach for collaborative filtering in order to mitigate the sparsity problem as well as to enhance the performance of recommender systems. In this study, we propose the methods of reducing the sparsity problem through supplementing the user-item matrix based on the implicit rating approach, which measures the trust level among users via the existing user-item matrix. This study provides the preliminary experimental results for testing the usefulness of the proposed model.