Collaborative filtering for people to people recommendation in social networks

Predicting people other people may like has recently become an important task in many online social networks. Traditional collaborative filtering approaches are popular in recommender systems to effectively predict user preferences for items. However, in online social networks people have a dual role as both “users” and “items”, e.g., both initiating and receiving contacts. Here the assumption of active users and passive items in traditional collaborative filtering is inapplicable. In this paper we propose a model that fully captures the bilateral role of user interactions within a social network and formulate collaborative filtering methods to enable people to people recommendation. In this model users can be similar to other users in two ways – either having similar “taste” for the users they contact, or having similar “attractiveness” for the users who contact them.We develop SocialCollab, a novel neighbourbased collaborative filtering algorithm to predict, for a given user, other users they may like to contact, based on user similarity in terms of both attractiveness and taste. In social networks this goes beyond traditional, merely taste-based, collaborative filtering for item selection. Evaluation of the proposed recommender system on datasets from a commercial online social network show improvements over traditional collaborative filtering.