iTARS: Trust-aware recommender system using implicit trust networks

Trust-aware recommender system (TARS) suggests the worthwhile information to the users on the basis of trust. Existing works of TARS suffers from the problem that they need extra user efforts to label the trust statements. The authors propose a novel model named iTARS to improve the existing TARS by using the implicit trust networks: instead of using the effort-consuming explicit trust, the easy available user similarity information is used to generate the implicit trusts for TARS. Further analysis shows that the implicit trust network has the small-world topology, which is independent of its dynamics. The rating prediction mechanism of iTARS is based on the small worldness of the implicit trust network: the authors set the maximum trust propagation distance of iTARS approximately equals the average path length of the trust network's corresponding random network. Experimental results show that with the same computational complexity, iTARS is able to improve the existing TARS works with higher rating prediction accuracy and slightly worse rating prediction coverage.