TruCom: Exploiting Domain-Specific Trust Networks for Multicategory Item Recommendation

Recommender systems (RSs) have become important tools for solving the problem of information overload. With the advent and popularity of online social networks, some studies on network-based recommendation have emerged, raising the concern of many researchers. Trust is one kind of important information available in social networks and is often used for performance improvement in social-network-based RSs. However, most trust-aware RSs ignore the fact that people trust different subsets of friends pertaining to different domains, such as music and movies, because people behave differently in diverse domains according to different interests. This paper proposes a novel recommendation method called TruCom. In a multicategory item recommendation domain, TruCom first generates a domain-specific trust network pertaining to each domain and then builds a unified objective function for improving recommendation accuracy by incorporating the hybrid information of direct and indirect trust into a matrix factorization recommendation model. Through relevant benchmark experiments on two real-world data sets, we show that TruCom achieves better performance than other existing recommendation methods, which demonstrates the effectiveness and reliability of TruCom.