Abstract
Online Social Rating Networks (SRNs) such as Epinions and Flixter, allow users to form several implicit social networks, through their daily interactions like co-commenting on the same products, or similarly co-rating products. The majority of earlier work in Rating Prediction and Recommendation of products (e.g. Collaborative Filtering) mainly takes into account ratings of users on products. However, in SRNs users can also built their explicit social network by adding each other as friends. In this paper, we propose Social-Union, a method which combines similarity matrices derived from heterogeneous (unipartite and bipartite) explicit or implicit SRNs. Moreover, we propose an effective weighting strategy of SRNs influence based on their structured density. We also generalize our model for combining multiple social networks. We perform an extensive experimental comparison of the proposed method against existing rating prediction and product recommendation algorithms, using synthetic and two real data sets (Epinions and Flixter). Our experimental results show that our Social-Union algorithm is more effective in predicting rating and recommending products in SRNs. © 2011 ACM.