Personalized recommendation system based on social relationships and historical behaviors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a recommendation algorithm that integrates social relationships and historical user behaviors, demonstrating improved accuracy and diversity across various user types, especially when social influence is strong.

Contribution

It proposes a novel algorithm that jointly leverages social relationships and historical behaviors, validated through experiments on different user groups.

Findings

Outperforms benchmark algorithms in accuracy and diversity.

Effectiveness depends on the coupling strength between social relationships and behaviors.

Improves recommendations for cold-start and inactive users.

Abstract

Previous studies show that recommendation algorithms based on historical behaviors of users can provide satisfactory recommendation performance. Many of these algorithms pay attention to the interest of users, while ignore the influence of social relationships on user behaviors. Social relationships not only carry intrinsic information of similar consumption tastes or behaviors, but also imply the influence of individual to its neighbors. In this paper, we assume that social relationships and historical behaviors of users are related to the same factors. Based on this assumption, we propose an algorithm to focus on social relationships useful for recommendation systems through mutual constraints from both types of information. We test the performance of our algorithm on four types of users, including all users, active users, inactive users and cold-start users. Results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms benchmarks in four types of scenarios subject to recommendation accuracy and diversity metrics. We further design a randomization model to explore the contribution of social relationships to recommendation performance, and the result shows that the contribution of social relationships in the proposed algorithm depends on the coupling strength of social relationships and historical behaviors.