KGR: A Kernel-Mapping Based Group Recommender System Using Trust Relations

A massive amount of information explosion over the internet has caused a possible difficulty of information overload. To overcome this, Recommender systems are systematic tools that are rapidly being employed in several domains such as movies, travel, E-commerce, and music. In the existing research, several methods have been proposed for single-user modeling, however, the massive rise of social connections potentially increases the significance of group recommender systems (GRS). A GRS is one that jointly recommends a list of items to a collection of individuals based on their interests. Moreover, the single-user model poses several challenges to recommender systems such as data sparsity, cold start, and long tail problems. On the contrary hand, another hotspot for group-based recommendation is the modeling of user preferences and interests based on the groups to which they belong using effective aggregation strategies. To address such issues, a novel “KGR” group recommender system based on user-trust relations is proposed in this study using kernel mapping techniques. In the proposed model, user-trust networks or relations are exploited to generate trust-based groups of users which is one of the important behavioral and social aspects. More precisely, in KGR the group kernels and group residual matrices are exploited as well as seeking a multi-linear mapping between encoded vectors of group-item interactions and probability density function indicating how groups will rate the items. Moreover, to emphasize the relevance of individual preferences of users in a group to which they belong, a hybrid approach is also suggested in which group kernels and individual user kernels are merged as additive and multiplicative models. Furthermore, the proposed KGR is validated on two different trust-based datasets including Film Trust and CiaoDVD. In addition, KGR outperforms with an RMSE value of 0.3306 and 0.3013 on FilmTrust and CiaoDVD datasets which are lower than the 1.8176 and 1.1092 observed with the original KMR.