Key figure impact in trust-enhanced recommender systems

Collaborative filtering recommender systems are typically unable to generate adequate recommendations for newcomers. Empirical evidence suggests that the incorporation of a trust network among the users of a recommender system can significantly help to alleviate this problem. Hence, users are highly encouraged to connect to other users to expand the trust network, but choosing whom to connect to is often a difficult task. Given the impact this choice has on the delivered recommendations, it is critical to guide newcomers through this early stage connection process. In this paper, we identify several classes of key figures in the trust network, namely mavens, frequent raters and connectors. Furthermore, we introduce measures to assess the influence of these users on the amount and the quality of the recommendations delivered by a trust-enhanced collaborative filtering recommender system. Experiments on a dataset from Epinions.com support the claim that generated recommendations for new users are more beneficial if they connect to an identified key figure compared to a random user.