Mining Implicit Correlations between Users with the Same Role for Trust-Aware Recommendation

Trust as one of important social relations has attracted much attention from researchers in the field of social network-based recommender systems. In trust network-based recommender systems, there exist normally two roles for users, truster and trustee. Most of trust-based methods generally utilize explicit links between truster and trustee to find similar neighbors for recommendation. However, there possibly exist implicit correlations between users, especially for users with the same role (truster or trustee). In this paper, we propose a novel Collaborative Filtering method called CF-TC, which exploits Trust Context to discover implicit correlation between users with the same role for recommendation. In this method, each user is first represented by the same-role users who are co-occurring with the user. Then, similarities between users with the same role are measured based on obtained user representation. Finally, two variants of our method are proposed to fuse these computed similarities into traditional collaborative filtering for rating prediction. Using two publicly available real-world Epinions and Ciao datasets, we conduct comprehensive experiments to compare the performance of our proposed method with some existing benchmark methods. The results show that CF-TC outperforms other baseline methods in terms of RMSE, MAE, and recall.