Social recommendation: A user profile clustering‐based approach

Abstract

Summary The recommendation in information systems is a specific form of information filtering that aims to present the relevant information interesting the user. This technique is used in different contexts such as social networking, e‐commerce and information retrieval. Generally, existing recommender system techniques implement collaborative filtering by deducing a part of user interests from the preferences of other users with similar profiles. Many techniques can be used to implement Collaborative Filtering such as Bayesian Networks, latent semantic, and clustering. We present in this work a novel clustering approach using a modified partitional algorithm. We propose a user model that integrates the relevant user information and a clustering algorithm that generates groups of similar user profiles by implementing a profile similarity function. The proposed approach is then evaluated based on a set of user profiles data corresponding to the context of an e‐commerce website.