Journal article

Information filtering in sparse online systems: recommendation via semi-local diffusion

  • Zeng, Wei Web Sciences Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China - Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Zeng, An Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Shang, Ming-Sheng Web Sciences Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China - Institute of Information Economy, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China
  • Zhang, Yi-Cheng Web Sciences Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China - Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
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    18.11.2013
Published in:
  • PLoS ONE. - 2013, vol. 8, no. 11, p. e79354
English With the rapid growth of the Internet and overwhelming amount of information and choices that people are confronted with, recommender systems have been developed to effectively support users’ decision-making process in the online systems. However, many recommendation algorithms suffer from the data sparsity problem, i.e. the user-object bipartite networks are so sparse that algorithms cannot accurately recommend objects for users. This data sparsity problem makes many well-known recommendation algorithms perform poorly. To solve the problem, we propose a recommendation algorithm based on the semi-local diffusion process on the user-object bipartite network. The simulation results on two sparse datasets, Amazon and Bookcross, show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods especially for those small-degree users. Two personalized semi-local diffusion methods are proposed which further improve the recommendation accuracy. Finally, our work indicates that sparse online systems are essentially different from the dense online systems, so it is necessary to reexamine former algorithms and conclusions based on dense data in sparse systems.
Faculty
Faculté des sciences et de médecine
Department
Département de Physique
Language
  • English
Classification
Physics
License
License undefined
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/303481
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