Improving the Recommendation of Collaborative Filtering by Fusing Trust Network

To accurately and actively provide users with their potentially interested information or services is the main task of a recommender system. Collaborative filtering is one of the most widely adopted recommender methods, whereas it is suffering the issue of sparse rating data that will severely degenerate the quality of recommendations. To address this issue, the article proposes a novel method, named the FTRA (Fusing Trust and Ratings), trying to improve the performance of collaborative filtering recommendation by means of elaborately integrating twofold sparse information, i.e., the conventional rating data given by users and the social trust network among the same users. The performance of FTRA is rigorously validated by comparing it with six representative methods on a real-world dataset. The experimental results show that the FTRA outperforms all other competitors in terms of both precision and recall. More importantly, our work suggests that the strategy of augmenting sparse rating data by fusing trust networks does significantly improve the quality of conventional collaborative filtering recommendation, and its quality could be further improved by means of designing more effective integrating schemes.