Hybrid recommender system using random walk with restart for social tagging system

Social Tagging Systems (STS) are very popular web application such that millions of people join the systems and actively share their contents. These enormous number of users are flooding STS with contents and tags in an unrestrained way in that threatening the capability of the system for relevant content retrieval and information sharing. Recommender Systems (RS) is a known successful method for overcome information overload problem by filtering the relevant contents over the nonrelevant contents. Besides manage folksonomy information, STS also handle social network information of its users. Both information can be used by RS to generate a good recommendation for its users. This work proposes an enhanced method for an existing hybrid recommender system, by incorporating social network information into the input of the hybrid recommender. The recommendation generation process includes Random Walk with Restart (RWR) alongside Content-Based Filtering (CBF) and Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods. Some parameters were introduced in the system to control weight contribution of each method. A comprehensive experiment with a set of a real-world open data set in two areas, social bookmark (Delicious.com) and music sharing (Last.fm) to test the proposed hybrid recommender system. The outcomes exhibit that it can give improvement compared to an existing method in terms of accuracy. The proposed hybrid achieves 24.4% more than RWR on the Delicious dataset, and 53.85% more than CBF on Lastfm dataset.