Exploring social influence for recommendation - A generative model approach

Social friendship has been shown beneficial for item recommendation for years. However, existing approaches mostly incorporate social friendship into recommender systems by heuristics. In this paper, we argue that social influence between friends can be captured quantitatively and propose a probabilistic generative model, called social influenced selection(SIS), to model the decision making of item selection (e.g., what book to buy or where to dine). Based on SIS, we mine the social influence between linked friends and the personal preferences of users through statistical inference. To address the challenges arising from multiple layers of hidden factors in SIS, we develop a new parameter learning algorithm based on expectation maximization (EM). Moreover, we show that the mined social influence and user preferences are valuable for group recommendation and viral marketing. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation using real datasets crawled from last.fm and whrrl.com to validate our proposal. Experimental results show that social influence captured based on our SIS model is effective for enhancing both item recommendation and group recommendation, essential for viral marketing, and useful for various user analysis.