Abstract:
In web-based social networks social trust relationships between users indicate the similarity of their needs and opinions. Trust in this sense can be used to make recommendations on the web because trust information enables the clustering of users based on their credibility which is aggregation of expertise and trustworthiness. In this paper, we propose a new approach to making recommendations based on leadersâ¿¿ credibility in the â¿¿Follow the Leaderâ¿ model as Top-N recommenders by incorporating social network information into user-based collaborative filtering. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of â¿¿Follow the Leaderâ¿ as a new approach to making recommendations, first we developed a Social Network Analysis Studio (SNAS) that captures real data from the Epinions dataset, next we used it to verify the proposed model. The empirical results incorporated in this paper, demonstrate that our approach is a significantly innovative approach to making effective CF based recommendations especially for cold start users.
