STAR: Semiring Trust Inference for Trust-Aware Social Recommenders

Social recommendation takes advantage of the influence of social relationships in decision making and the ready availability of social data through social networking systems. Trust relationships in particular can be exploited in such systems for rating prediction and recommendation, which has been shown to have the potential for improving the quality of the recommender and alleviating the issue of data sparsity, cold start, and adversarial attacks. An appropriate trust inference mechanism is necessary in extending the knowledge base of trust opinions and tackling the issue of limited trust information due to connection sparsity of social networks. In this work, we offer a new solution to trust inference in social networks to provide a better knowledge base for trust-aware recommender systems. We propose using a semiring framework as a nonlinear way to combine trust evidences for inferring trust, where trust relationship is model as 2-D vector containing both trust and certainty information. The trust propagation and aggregation rules, as the building blocks of our trust inference scheme, are based upon the properties of trust relationships. In our approach, both trust and distrust (i.e., positive and negative trust) are considered, and opinion conflict resolution is supported. We evaluate the proposed approach on real-world datasets, and show that our trust inference framework has high accuracy, and is capable of handling trust relationship in large networks. The inferred trust relationships can enlarge the knowledge base for trust information and improve the quality of trust-aware recommendation.