Heterogeneity in initial resource configurations improves a network-based hybrid recommendation algorithm

Network-based recommendation algorithms for user-object link predictions have achieved significant developments in recent years. For bipartite graphs, the resource reallocation in such algorithms is analogous to heat spreading (HeatS) or probability spreading (ProbS) processes. The best algorithm to date is a hybrid of the HeatS and ProbS techniques with homogeneous initial resource configurations, which fulfills simultaneously high accuracy and large diversity requirements. We investigate the effect of heterogeneity in initial configurations on the HeatS + ProbS hybrid algorithm and find that both recommendation accuracy and diversity can be further improved in this new setting. Numerical experiments show that the improvement is robust. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.