Social recommendation: a review

Recommender systems play an important role in helping online users find relevant information by suggesting information of potential interest to them. Due to the potential value of social relations in recommender systems, social recommendation has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In this paper, we present a review of existing recommender systems and discuss some research directions. We begin by giving formal definitions of social recommendation and discuss the unique property of social recommendation and its implications compared with those of traditional recommender systems. Then, we classify existing social recommender systems into memory-based social recommender systems and model-based social recommender systems, according to the basic models adopted to build the systems, and review representative systems for each category. We also present some key findings from both positive and negative experiences in building social recommender systems, and research directions to improve social recommendation capabilities.

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1. Department of Computer Science, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA Jiliang Tang, Xia Hu & Huan Liu

1. Jiliang Tang

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Tang, J., Hu, X. & Liu, H. Social recommendation: a review. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 3, 1113–1133 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-013-0141-9

• Received : 24 April 2013
• Revised : 18 September 2013
• Accepted : 01 October 2013
• Published : 09 November 2013
• Issue Date : December 2013
• DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-013-0141-9

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Keywords

• Social recommendation
• Social recommender systems
• Recommender systems
• Social network analysis
• Social media