A social influence based trust model for recommender systems

Trustworthy computing has recently attracted significant interest from researchers in several fields including multi-agent systems, social network analysis, and recommender systems. As an additional dimension of information to past rating history, trust has been shown to be helpful for improving the accuracy of recommendations. Studies on the relationship between trust and rating behaviors may provide insights into the formation of trust in the context of online community, and lead to possible indicators for the effective use of trust in recommendations. In this paper, we study people's trust and rating behavior with the Epinions dataset. Epinions.com is a popular product review website allowing users to rate various categories of products, and establish a list of trustworthy users. We perform correlation analysis of activeness and trustworthiness defined by the number of ratings and the number of trustors to derive findings that can help the design of new decision support mechanisms in trust-based recommender systems. We then propose a trustee-influence based trust model where a trustee's activeness or trustworthiness is used to determine trust relationships. This trust model is incorporated into a memory-based and matrix factorization recommender systems to support online purchasing decision-making. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed trust model for recommendation.