Recommendation algorithm based on community structure and user trust

Abstract

While contemporary community-based recommendation algorithms based on a single community structure are more capable of processing large datasets than ever, they lack recommendation precision. This article proposes a collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm that integrates community structure and user implicit trust. The algorithm first applies a method based on the Gaussian function to fill the matrix of item ratings of users to alleviate data sparsity. It then uses the trust matrix to obtain the asymmetric trust relationship of the trustor and trustee, based on which the degree of users' implicit trust is calculated. The users are divided into communities based on the implicit trust degree to determine the influence among users more accurately.The algorithm then predicts the target user's rating using the ratings of users in the community to generate recommendations. To verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, we compared the proposed algorithm with three contemporary algorithms under the same conditions using FilmTrust datasets. The recommendation accuracy as well as the mean absolute error and root mean square error values of the proposed algorithm were better than those of the other four algorithms by approximately 14% and 4%, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better recommendation efficiency than existing algorithms.