A matrix factorization technique with trust propagation for recommendation in social networks

Recommender systems are becoming tools of choice to select the online information relevant to a given user. Collaborative filtering is the most popular approach to building recommender systems and has been successfully employed in many applications. With the advent of online social networks, the social network based approach to recommendation has emerged. This approach assumes a social network among users and makes recommendations for a user based on the ratings of the users that have direct or indirect social relations with the given user. As one of their major benefits, social network based approaches have been shown to reduce the problems with cold start users. In this paper, we explore a model-based…