A Community Driven Social Recommendation System

Abstract

Recommendation systems play an important role in suggesting relevant information to users. In this paper, we introduce community-wise social interactions as a new dimension for recommendations and present a social recommendation system using collaborative filtering and community detection approaches. We use (i) community detection algorithm to extract friendship relations among users by analyzing user-user social graph and (ii) user-item based collaborative filtering for rating prediction. We developed our approach using map-reduce framework. Our approach improves scalability, coverage and cold start issue of collaborative filtering based recommendation system. We carried out experiments on MovieLens and Facebook datasets, to predict the rating of the movie and produce top-k recommendations for new (cold start) user. The results are compared with traditional collaborative filtering based recommendation system.