Exploiting trustors as well as trustees in trust-based recommendation

Abstract

In a trust network, two users who are connected by a trust relationship tend to have similar interests. Based on this observation, existing trust-aware recommendation methods predict ratings for a target user on unseen items by referencing to ratings of those users who are reachable from the target user in the forward direction of trustor-trustee relationship through the trust network. However, these methods have overlooked the possibility of utilizing the ratings of those users reachable in the backward direction, which may also have similar interests. In this paper, we investigate this possibility by identifying and adding these users to the existing methods when predicting ratings for the target user. We perform a series of experiments and observe that our approach improves the coverage while preserving the accuracy.