Improving top-K recommendation with truster and trustee relationship in user trust network

Due to the data sparsity problem, social network information is often additionally used to improve the performance of recommender systems. While most existing works exploit social information to reduce the rating prediction error, e.g., RMSE, a few had aimed to improve the top-k ranking prediction accuracy. This paper proposes a novel top-k ranking oriented recommendation method, TRecSo, which incorporates social information into recommendation by modeling two different roles of users as trusters and trustees while considering the structural information of the network. Empirical studies on real-world datasets demonstrate that TRecSo leads to a remarkable improvement compared with previous methods in top-k recommendation. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.