A Novel Recommendation Model

This is the author's version of an article that has been published in this journal.
Changes were made to this version by the publisher prior to publication.

The final version of record is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2016.2528249
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON KNOWLEDGE AND DATA ENGINEERING 1
A Novel Recommendation Model Regularized

with User Trust and Item Ratings
Guibing Guo, Jie Zhang, and Neil Yorke-Smith
Abstract—We propose TrustSVD, a trust-based matrix factorization technique for recommendations. TrustSVD integrates multiple
information sources into the recommendation model in order to reduce the data sparsity and cold start problems and their degradation
of recommendation performance. An analysis of social trust data from four real-world data sets suggests that not only the explicit but
also the implicit influence of both ratings and trust should be taken into consideration in a recommendation model. TrustSVD therefore
builds on top of a state-of-the-art recommendation algorithm, SVD++ (which uses the explicit and implicit influence of rated items), by
further incorporating both the explicit and implicit influence of trusted and trusting users on the prediction of items for an active user.
The proposed technique is the first to extend SVD++ with social trust information. Experimental results on the four data sets
demonstrate that TrustSVD achieves better accuracy than other ten counterparts recommendation techniques.
Index Terms—Recommender systems, social trust, matrix factorization, implicit trust, collaborative filtering
1 I NTRODUCTION
R ECOMMENDER systems have been widely used to pro-

vide users with high-quality personalized recommen-
dations from a large volume of choices. Robust and accu-
on user-item ratings. For instance, a well-performing trust-
based model [8] obtains 1.0585 on data set Epinions.com
in terms of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), whereas the
rate recommendations are important in e-commerce oper- performance of a user-item baseline (see Koren [11], Section
ations (e.g., navigating product offerings, personalization, 2.1) can achieve 1.0472 in terms of RMSE.1
improving customer satisfaction), and in marketing (e.g., One possible explanation is that these trust-based mod-
tailored advertising, segmentation, cross-selling). Collabo- els focus too much on the utility of user trust but ignore
rative filtering (CF) is one of the most popular techniques the influence of item ratings themselves. To investigate this
to implement a recommender system [1]. The idea of CF is phenomenon, we conduct an empirical trust analysis based
that users with similar preferences in the past are likely to on four real-word data sets (FilmTrust, Epinions, Flixster
favour the same items (e.g., movies, music, books, etc.) in and Ciao) through which three important observations are
the future. CF has also been applied to tasks besides item concluded. First, trust information is also very sparse, yet
recommendations in domains such as image processing [2] complementary to rating information. Hence, focusing too
and bioinformatics [3]. However, CF suffers from two well- much on either one kind of information may achieve only
known issues: data sparsity and cold start [4]. The former marginal gains in predictive accuracy. Second, users are
issue refers to the fact that users usually rate only a small strongly correlated with their out-going trusted neighbors
portion of items while the latter indicates that new users (i.e., trustees) whereas they have a weakly positive cor-
only give a few ratings (a.k.a. cold-start users). Both issues relation with their trust-alike neighbors (e.g., friends). We
severely degrade the efficiency of a recommender system defer the definition of trust-alike relationships to Section 3.1.
in modeling user preferences and thus the accuracy of The third observation further indicates a similar conclusion
predicting a user’s rating for an unknown item. with in-coming trusting neighbors (i.e., trusters). Hence,
To help resolve these issues, many researchers [5], [6], it implies that existing trust-based models may not work
[7], [8], [9] attempt to incorporate social trust information well if there exists only trust-alike relationships. Given
into their recommendation models, given that model-based that very few trust networks exist, it is better to have a
CF approaches outperform memory-based ones [10]. These more general trust-based model that can well operate on
approaches further regularize the user-specific feature vec- both trust and trust-alike relationships. These observations
tors by the phenomenon that friends often influence each motivate us to consider both explicit and implicit influence
other on recommending items. However, even the best per- of item ratings and of user trust in a unified trust-based
formance reported by the latest work [9] can be inferior to model. The influence can be explicit (real values of ratings
that of other state-of-the-art models which are merely based and trust) or implicit (who rates what (for ratings) and
who trusts whom (for trust)). The implicit influence of
• G. Guo is with the Northeastern University, China, and Nanyang Tech- ratings has been demonstrated useful in providing accurate
nological University, Singapore. recommendations [12]. We will later show that implicit trust
E-mail: guogb@swc.neu.edu.cn
• J. Zhang is with the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Techno-
can also provide added value over explicit trust.
logical University, Singapore.
• N. Yorke-Smith is with the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business,
1. Smaller RMSE values indicate better predictive accuracy. The result
American University of Beirut, Lebanon.
is reported by the well-known recommendation toolkit MyMediaLite
Manuscript received Jan. 5th, 2016. (www.mymedialite.net/examples/datasets.html).
Copyright (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted. For any other purposes, permission must be obtained from the IEEE by emailing pubs-permissions@ieee.org.
This is the author's version of an article that has been published in this journal. Changes were made to this version by the publisher prior to publication.
In this article, we propose a novel trust-based recommen- of trust neighbors per user, and find out that our approach
dation model regularized with user trust and item ratings, consistently provides better recommendation performance.
termed as TrustSVD. Our approach builds on top of a state-
Outline. The rest of this article is organized as follows.
of-the-art model SVD++ [12] through which both the explicit
Section 2 provides a brief overview of trust-based recom-
and implicit influence of user-item ratings are involved to
mender systems in the literature. The trust data from four
generate predictions. In addition, we further consider the
real-world data sets is analyzed in Section 3 where three
influence of trust users (including trustees and trusters)
important observations are concluded. Then, our TrustSVD
on the rating prediction for an active user. To the authors’
approach is elaborated in Section 4 regarding model formal-
knowledge, our work is the first to extend SVD++ with so-
ization and learning, followed by the empirical evaluation
cial trust information. Specifically, on one hand the implicit
conducted in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes the
influence of trust (who trusts whom) can be naturally added
present work and outlines future research.
to the SVD++ model by extending the user modeling. On the
other hand, the explicit influence of trust (trust values) is
used to constrain that user-specific vectors should conform 2 R ELATED W ORK
to their social trust relationships. This ensures that user- Trust-aware recommender systems have been widely stud-
specific vectors can be learned from their trust information ied [14], given that social trust provides an alternative view
even if a few or no ratings are given. In this way, the of user preferences other than item ratings [15]. Yuan et
concerned issues can be better alleviated. Therefore, both al. [16] find that trust networks are small-world networks
explicit and implicit influence of item ratings and user trust where two random users are socially connected in a small
have been considered in our model, indicating its novelty. In distance, indicating the implication of trust in recommender
addition, a weighted-λ-regularization technique is used to systems. In fact, it has been demonstrated that incorporating
help avoid over-fitting for model learning. The experimental the social trust information of users is able to improve the
results on the four real-world data sets demonstrate that our performance of recommendations. There are two main rec-
approach works significantly better than other trust-based ommendation tasks in recommender systems, namely item
counterparts as well as other ratings-only high-performing recommendation and rating prediction. Most algorithmic
models (ten approaches in total) in terms of predictive approaches are only (or best) designed for either one of the
accuracy, and is more capable of coping with the cold-start recommendations tasks, and our work focues on the rating
situations. prediction task.
Summary of Contributions. This work makes the following
key contributions. Our first contribution is to conduct an 2.1 Rating Prediction
empirical trust analysis and observe that trust and ratings
can complement to each other, and that users may be Many approaches have been proposed in this field, includ-
strongly or weakly correlated with each other according to ing both memory- and model-based methods. We survey
different types of social relationships. These observations some representative memory-based methods. Massa and
motivate us to consider both explicit and implicit influence Avesani [17] show that trust-aware recommender systems
of ratings and trust into our trust-based model. Potentially, can help enable more items for recommendation while pre-
these observations could be also beneficial for solving other serving competing predictive accuracy, where trust is propa-
kinds of recommendation problems, e.g., top-N item recom- gated in trust networks to evaluate users’ weights. Similarly,
mendation. Golbeck [18] proposes a TidalTrust approach to aggregate the
Our second contribution is to propose a novel trust- ratings of trusted neighbors for a rating prediction, where
based recommendation approach (TrustSVD2 ) that incorpo- trust is computed in a breadth-first manner. Guo et al. [4]
rates both (explicit and implicit) influence of rating and complement a user’s rating profile by merging those of
trust information. No previous work has considered these trusted users through which better recommendations can
two types of influence simultaneously, and this is the first be generated, and the cold start and data sparsity problems
work that extends SVD++ with social trust information. can be better handled. However, memory-based approaches
Specifically, the implicit influence of a user’s trusters and have difficulty in adapting to large-scale data sets, and are
trustees is used to model her feature-specific vector other often time-consuming to search candidate neighbors in a
than the implicit feedback of rated items. The explicit in- large user space. In contrast, model-based approaches can
fluence of trust values is used to factorize trust matrix into be well scaled up to large data sets and more efficiently
truster/trustee-specific vectors, bridging ratings and trust to generate rating predictions. Most importantly, they have
into a unified model. been demonstrated to achieve higher accuracy and better al-
Our third contribution is to conduct extensive exper- leviate the data sparsity issue than memory-based ones [10].
iments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed ap- Quite a few trust-based recommendation models have
proach in two different types of testing views of all users been proposed to date. For example, Guo et al. [15] cluster
and cold-start users. By comparing with ten baselines and users by multiviews of similarity and trust, in order to
state-of-the-art recommendation models, we show that our resolve the relative low accuracy and coverage issues of
approach performs better in terms of predictive accuracy clustering-based recommendations. They also make use of
in the two testing views. We further investigate the perfor- both ratings and trust to properly cluster cold-start users,
mance of trust-based models with respect to the number i.e., mitigating the cold-start problem. Jamali et al. [19]
propose a social-aware stochastic block model where users
2. A preliminary report of TrustSVD was published at AAAI’15 [13]. and items are jointly classified to user and item groups in
a social rating network. The interactions of group member- phenomenon, we next conduct trust analysis to investigate
ships determine if a user will connect with another user (i.e., the value of trust in recommender systems. We argue that
link prediction) or be interested in a target item. However, the the main reasons are in two-fold. First, the existing trust-
empirical results show that this model is better at link pre- based models consider only the explicit influence of ratings.
diction than rating prediction. The most popular and widely The utility of ratings is not well exploited. The first obser-
studied recommendation models are matrix factorization- vation in Section 3 will show that trust information could
based models [10], [20] which aim to factorize the user- be even sparser than rating information. This motivates us
item rating matrix into two low-rank user-feature and item- to build a new trust-based model based on SVD++ that
feature matrices. Then the predictions can be generated by inherently and well considers both the explicit and implicit
the inner products of user- and item-specific latent feature influence of ratings. Second, these trust-based models do
vectors [21]. Specifically, Ma et al. [5], [6], [22] developed not consider the explicit and implicit influence of trust
several approaches by adding different trust regularization simultaneously. As will be explained in the second and
terms to a matrix factorization model. They first proposed third observations in Section 3, this may lead to deteriorated
a social regularization SoRec method by considering the performance when being applied to social relationships
constraint of social relationships [5]. The idea is to share with smaller correlations with user similarity. Therefore, we
a common user-feature matrix factorized by ratings and by incorporate into SVD++ both explicit and implicit influence
trust. Ma et al. [22] then proposed a social trust ensemble of social trust, to enhance the generality of our proposed
method (denoted by RSTE) to linearly combine a basic model. By doing so, a better way to utilize user-item ratings
matrix factorization model and a trust-based neighborhood and user-user trust is proposed.
model together. The same authors [6] further proposed that
the active user’s user-specific vector should be close to the
average of her trusted users, and used it as a regularization 2.2 Item Recommendation
to form a new matrix factorization model SoReg. A state-of- We give a short review of trust-based appraoches for item
the-art approach, termed as SocialMF is proposed by Jamali recommendation. Specifically, Jamali and Ester [27] propose
and Ester [7]. It is built on top of SoRec [22] by reformulating TrustWalker, a random walk model that combines an item-
the contributions of trusted users to the formation of the ac- based ranking method and a trust-based nearest neighbor
tive user’s user-specific vector rather than to the predictions model. Yuan et al. [28] fuse two kinds of social relationships,
of items, and by enabling the property of trust propagation. i.e., friendship and membership in a unified matrix factor-
Yang et al. [23] highlight the domain-specific property of ization model. In this article, we only consider one kind of
trust and propose three different approaches to infer the social relationships, i.e., either trust or trust-alike, but we
trust in each friend circle. By substituting the general trust verify the generality and application of our model to both
with inferred circle-based trust, they show that the perfor- kinds of social relationships. Rendle et al. [29] give a state-
mance of the SocialMF model can be further improved. of-the-art model known as Bayesian personalized ranking
Zhu et al. [24] propose a graph Laplacian regularizer to (BPR) for item recommendation based on implicit feedback.
capture the potentially social relationships among users, The basic idea is to assume that a rated item for an active
and form the social recommendation problem as a low- user is preferred to an unrated item. However, negative
rank semidefinite problem. However, empirical evaluation samples may be due to the unawareness of items rather than
indicates that very marginal improvements are obtained in dislike. Hence, this assumption may be invalid in practice.
comparison with the RSTE model. More recently, Yang et To relax this assumption, Zhao et al. [30] propose a Social
al. [8] propose a hybrid method TrustMF that combines both Bayesian personalized ranking (SBPR) method, presuming
a truster model and a trustee model from the perspectives that an item consumed by an active user is preferred to that
of trusters and trustees, that is, both the users who trust consumed by her friends which is then preferred to the item
the active user and those who are trusted by the user will consumed by other users. However, the assumption of SBPR
influence the user’s ratings on unknown items. They show may not be valid in some social recommender systems.
that better predictive accuracy is achieved than other trust- Note that there are some other trust-unaware BPR variants.
based models. Tang et al. [25] consider both global and For example, Pan et al. [31] propose an adaptive BPR to
local trust as the contextual information in their model, accommodate heterogenous implicit feedback. These kinds
where the global trust is computed by a separate algorithm. of BPR variants are beyond the discussion of this article.
Yao et al. [26] take into consideration both the explicit Essentially, item recommendation and rating predictions
and implicit interactions among trusters and trustees in a are two distinct recommendation tasks. They differ in the
recommendation model. Most recently, Fang et al. [9] stress following aspects. First, the main objective is different.
the importance of multiple aspects of social trust. They Item recommendation targets an ordered list of interesting
decompose trust into four general factors and then integrate items, and thus does not care about the possible ratings
them into a matrix factorization model through which better users may give. In contrast, rating prediction aims to pre-
performance is achieved. dict the possbile rating as close as possible. It has been
In summary, all these works have shown that a matrix demonstrated that directly ranking by predicted ratings will
factorization model regularized by trust outperforms the result in poor ranking performance. Second, the training
one without trust. That is, trust is helpful in improving process of item recommendation is necessary to consider
predictive accuracy. However, it is also noted that even both positive and negative samples while rating predictions
the latest work [9] can be inferior to other well-performing function only on positive samples, i.e., observed data. Third,
ratings-only models such as SVD++ [12]. To explain this item recommendation is often measured in terms of list
ranking performance, while rating prediction is estimated TABLE 1: Statistics of the four data sets
by the errors between prediction and ground truth. Lastly, Feature Epinions FilmTrust Flixster Ciao
although item recommendaiton is more prevalent in reality, # users 40,163 1,508 53,213 7,375
it is still valuable to predict a possible rating that a user may # items 139,738 2,071 18,197 99,746
provide for an unrated item, e.g., in a peer-review system as # ratings 664,824 35,497 409,803 280,391
density 0.051% 1.14% 0.04% 0.03%
pointed out by Barbieri et al. [32]. We would like to stress
# trusters 33,960 609 47,029 6,792
that our work is focused on the recommendation task of # trustees 49,288 732 47,029 7,297
rating prediction rather than item recommendation. # trusts 487,183 1,853 655,054 111,781
density 0.029% 0.42% 0.03% 0.23%
3 T RUST A NALYSIS
We first introduce the concepts of trust and trust-alike in the evaluation of previous trust-aware recommender
relationships, and then proceed to analyze the influence of systems. In particular, the items in Epinions and Ciao are
trust for rating prediction based on real-world data sets. of great variety, such as electronics, sports, computers, etc,
while the items in FilmTrust and Flixster are merely movies.
3.1 Trust vs. Trust-alike Relationships The ratings in Epinions and Ciao are integers from 1 to 5,
while those in the other data sets are real values, i.e., [0.5,
For ease of exposition, we first classify the social relation-
4.0] for FilmTrust, [0.5, 5.0] for Flixster both with step 0.5.
ships for recommender systems into two categories, i.e.,
Users in these data sets can share their item ratings with
trust and trust-alike, and then depict their similarities and
each other and pro-actively connect with users of similar
differences. In this article, we adopt the definition of trust
taste, whereby a social network can be constructed. The data
given by Guo [33] as one’s belief towards the ability of others in
set statistics are illustrated in Table 1.
providing valuable ratings. It includes a positive and subjec-
By definition, the social relationships in Epinions and
tive evaluation about other’s ability in providing valuable
Ciao are trust relationships whereas those in Flixster and
ratings. Trust can be further split into explit trust and implicit
FilmTrust are trust-alike relationships. To explain, users in
trust. Explicit trust refers to the trust statements directly
Epinions and Ciao specify others as trustworthy usually
specified by users. For example, users in Epinions and Ciao
based on the evaluation of quality of others’ ratings and
can add other users into their trust lists. By contrast, implicit
textual reviews. Flixster adopts the concept of friendship
trust is the relationship that is not directly specified by users
per se where user relations are symmetric and related with
and that is often inferred by other information, such as user
movies only. Although FilmTrust adopts the concept of trust
ratings. In this article, we only exploit the value of explicit
(with original values from 1 to 10), the publicly available
trust for rating prediction.
data set contains only binary values. Such degrading may
We define the trust-alike relationships as the social rela-
cause much noise and thus we classify the relationships as
tionships that are similar with, but weaker (or more noisy)
trust-alike rather than trust.
than social trust. The similarities are that both kinds of
For clarity, in this article we refer trust users or trust
relationships indicate user preferences to some extent and
neighbors to as the union set of users who trust an active user
thus useful for recommender systems, while the differences
(i.e., trusters) and of users who are trusted by the active user
are that trust-alike relationships are often weaker in strength
(i.e., trustees).
and likely to be more noisy. Typical examples are friendship
and membership for recommender systems. Although these
relationships also indicate that users may have a positive 3.3 Observations
correlation with user similarity, there is no guarantee that Next we present three observations that are concluded from
such a positive evaluation always exists and that the correla- the four data sets, and underpin the formation of our trust-
tion will be strong. It is well recognized that friendship can based model.
be built based on offline relations, such as colleagues and Observation 1. Trust information is very sparse, yet is
classmates, which does not necessarily share similar prefer- complementary to rating information.
ences. Trust is a complex concept with a number of prop-
erties, such as asymmetry and domain dependence [34], On one hand, as shown in Table 1, the density of trust
which trust-alike relationships may not hold, e.g., friendship is much smaller than that of ratings in Epinions, FilmTrust
is undirected and domain independent. and Flixster whereas trust is only denser than ratings in
Ciao. Both ratings and trust are very sparse in general
across all the data sets. In this regard, a trust-aware rec-
3.2 Data Sets
ommender system that focuses too much on trust (rather
The four data sets used in our analysis and also our later than rating) utility is likely to achieve only marginal gains
experiments are: Epinions3 , FilmTrust4 , Flixster5 and Ciao6 . in recommendation performance. As explained earlier, even
These four data sets are likely to be the only publicly the latest trust-based model cannot always beat the baseline
available data sets that contain both item ratings and social approaches which generate predictions solely based on rat-
relationships specified by active users. They are widely used ings. In fact, the existing trust-based models consider only
the explicit influence of ratings. That is, the utility of ratings
3. trustlet.org/wiki/Epinions datasets
4. www.librec.net/datasets.html is not well exploited. In addition, the sparsity of explicit
5. www.cs.sfu.ca/∼sja25/personal/datasets/ trust also implies the importance of involving implicit trust
6. www.public.asu.edu/∼jtang20/datasetcode/truststudy.htm in collaborative filtering. Therefore, a better way may stress
0.5 0.5
FilmTrust Epinions FilmTrust Epinions FilmTrust Epinions
0.8 Flixster Ciao Flixster Ciao
Flixster Ciao
0.4 Average 0.4 Average
Average
0.6
Ratio of users
Percentage
Percentage
0.3 0.3
0.4
0.2 0.2
0.2 0.1 0.1
0 0 0
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# Ratings per user Correlation ranges Correlation ranges
(a) (b) (c)
Fig. 1: (a) The distribution of ratio of users who have issued trust statements w.r.t. the number of ratings that they each
have given; (b) The correlations between a user’s ratings and those of her out-going trusted neighbors (i.e., trustees); (c)
The correlations between a user’s ratings and those of her in-coming trusting neighbors (i.e., trusters).
that both the influence of user trust and item ratings should To have an intuitive comprehension of trustees’ influ-
be taken into account for rating prediction. ence, we calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC)
On the other hand, trust information is complementary between a user’s ratings and the average of her social
to the rating information. Figure 1a illustrates the distribu- neighbors. The results are presented in Figure 1b, indicating
tion of ratio of users who have specified others as trusted that: (1) A weakly positive correlation is observed between
friends (users) with respect to the number of ratings that a user’s ratings and the average of the social neighbors
each of these users has given. It shows that: (1) A portion in FilmTrust (mean 0.183) and Flixster (0.063). The distri-
of users have not rated any items but are socially connected butions of the two data sets are similar. (2) Under the
with other users, e.g., 9.20% in FilmTrust, 16.65% in Epinions concept of trust relationships, on the contrary, a user’s rat-
and up to 81.28% in Flixster7 . (2) For the cold-start users ings are strongly and positively correlated with the average
who have rated few items (less than 5 in our case), trust of trusted neighbors. Specifically, a large portion (17.63%
information can provide a complementary part of source of in Epinions, 13.14% in Ciao) of user correlations are in
information with ratio greater than 10% on average. (3) The the range of [0.9, 1.0], and (resp. 54.70%, 39.14%) of user
warm-start users who have rated a lot of items (e.g., > 20) correlations are greater than 0.5. The average correlation is
are not necessary to specify many other users as trustworthy 0.446 in Epinions, and 0.322 in Ciao. Since PCC values are
(12% on the average). As a consequence, although having in the range of [−1, 1], values of 0.446 and 0.322 indicate
distinct distributions across the different data sets, trust can decent correlations. In the social networks with relatively
be a complementary information source to item ratings for weak trust-alike relationships, implicit influence (i.e., binary
recommender systems. relationships) may be more indicative than explicit (but
This observation motivates us to consider both the ex- noisy) values for recommendations. In addition, most online
plicit and implicit influence of item ratings and user trust, social networks do not adopt the concept of trust relation-
making better and more use of them to resolve the data ships, but relatively weak trust-alike relationships. Hence, a
sparsity and cold start problems. trust-based model that ignores the implicit influence of item
Observation 2. A user’s ratings have a weakly positive ratings and user trust may lead to deteriorated performance
correlation with the average of her out-going social if being applied to such cases. We claim that a good trust-
neighbors under the concept of trust-alike relationships, based model should function well not only for strong trust
and a strongly positive correlation under the concept of relationships, but also for relatively weak trust-alike ones.
trust relationships. As the strength of correlations depends on the type of
social relationships, the performance (thus generality) of
Although a user’s rating to a certain item is mainly deter- a recommendation model may be limited if only explicit
mined by the intrinsic attributes (or properties, features) of influence of social influence is adopted. Hence, the second
the item in question and how she appreciates these features, observation suggests that incorporating both the explicit
some extrinsic attributes may also have a non-negligible and implicit influence of item ratings and user trust may
influence on the user’s ratings. In this work, we focus on promote the generality of a trust-based model to both trust
the influence of social trust in rating prediction, i.e., the and trust-alike social relationships.
influence of trust neighbors on an active user’s rating for a Observation 3. A user’s ratings have a weakly positive
specific item, a.k.a. social influence. A graphical explanation correlation with the average of her in-coming social
is given in Figure 2a. Briefly, user u trusts user v , and user neighbors under the concept of trust-alike relationships,
v has rated item j by giving a rating rv,j . Then, user u may and a strongly positive correlation under the concept of
consider the ratings of her trustees when giving her own trust relationships.
rating ru,j . Yang et al. [8] have also shown that trusted users
will affect users’ ratings in their model. In social networks, a user may pro-actively connect to
a number of social friends, and may also be connected
7. All the users in the Ciao data set have rated at least one item. by some other users. Thus, the social influence of one’s
4.1 Problem Definition

user/truster u user/truster k
In social rating networks a user can label (add) other users
u trusts v k trusts u
as trusted friends and thus form a social network. Trust is
not symmetric; for example, users u1 trusts u3 but u3 does
user/trustee v ru, j= ? user/trustee u
rating rk, j not specify user u1 as trustworthy. Besides, users can rate a
set of items using a number of rating values, e.g., integers
rating rv, j ru, j= ? from 1 to 5. These items could be products, movies, music,
etc. of interest. The recommendation problem in this work
item j item j is to predict the rating that a user will give to an unknown
item, for example, the value that user u3 will give to item
(a) (b) i3 , based on both a user-item rating matrix and a user-
user trust matrix. Other well-recognized recommendation
Fig. 2: The influence of (a) trustees v and (b) trusters k on problems include for example top-N item recommendation.
the rating prediction for the active user u and target item j Suppose that a recommender system includes m users
and n items. Let R = [ru,i ]m×n denote the user-item rating
matrix, where each entry ru,i represents the rating given
ratings may flow in both directions. In other words, a user’s by user u on item i. For clarity, we preserve symbols u, v
rating is influenced not just by her trustees, but also by the for users, and i, j for items. Since a user only rated a
users who trust her (i.e., her trusters). Yang et al. [8] have small portion of items, the rating matrix R is only partially
also indicated that trusting users have an impact on users’ observed and oftentimes very sparse. Let Iu = {i|ru,i 6= 0}
rating prediction. Yao et al. [26] design and combine both denote the set of items rated by user u. Let pu and qi be
truster and trustee regularizers in a unified recommendation a d-dimensional latent feature vector of user u and item i,
model, indicating the value of the influence of trusters. respectively. The essence of matrix factorization is to find
Figure 2b gives an illustrative presentation. Specifically, user two low-rank matrices: user-feature matrix P ∈ Rd×m and
k trusts user u, and gives a rating to the target item j the item-feature matrix Q ∈ Rd×n that can adequately recover
action of which may further influence user u’s rating on the the rating matrix R, i.e., R ≈ P > Q, where P > is the
same item. Similar with the last observation, we calculate transpose of matrix P . The underlying assumption is that
the correlations between a user’s ratings and the average of both users and items can be characterized by a small number
her trusters’ ratings. The results are presented in Figure 1c. of features. Hence, the rating on item j for user u can be
Note that the distribution in Flixster is the same with that in predicted by the inner product of user-specific vector pu and
Figure 1b. The reason is that the friendships in Flixster are item-specific vector qj , i.e., r̂u,j = qj> pu . In this regard, the
symmetric and undirected. main task of recommendations is to predict the rating r̂u,j
Compared with Figure 1b, similar distributions of user as close as possible to the ground truth ru,j . Formally, we
correlations can be observed, and the differences in each can learn the user- and item-feature matrices by minimizing
correlation range are relatively small. For example, there the following loss (objective) function:
are 30.82% negative user correlations in Figure 1b while
the percentage in Figure 1c is around 31.69%. Therefore, a 1XX > 2 λ X X
Lr = qj pu −ru,j + kpu k2F + kqj k2F ,
similar observation can be drawn from the empirical results, 2 u j∈I 2 u j
u
i.e., users have a weakly (strongly) positive correlation with
the average of her in-coming social neighbors under the where k · kF denotes the Frobenius norm, and λ is a param-
concept of trust-alike (trust) relationships. eter to control model complexity and to avoid over-fitting.
The third observation implies that the influence of On the other hand, suppose that a social network is
trusters (in rating prediction) may be comparable with that represented by a graph G = (V, E), where V includes a
of trustees, and thus may also provide added value to set of m nodes (users) and E represents the directed trust
item ratings. Our approach presented next is built upon relationships among users. We can use the adjacency matrix
these three observations. Our findings also coincide with T = [tu,v ]m×m to describe the structure of edges E , where
the conclusion reported by H. Ma [35], where it is again tu,v indicates the extent to which users u trusts v . Usually,
confirmed that trust and similarity are strongly correlated only binary values are used, i.e., tu,v = 1 means that user
while friendship and similarity are correlated much less and u trusts user v whereas tu,v = 0 indicates the non-trust
more varied. In our case, we further classify and generalize relationship. Similarly, the trust matrix T is also very sparse.
the social relationships which have smaller correlations with We denote pu and wv as the d-dimensional latent feature
user interest as trust-alike relationships. vector of truster u and trustee v , respectively. We limit the
trusters in the trust matrix and the active users in the rating
matrix to share the same user-feature space in order to
4 T RUST SVD: A T RUST- BASED R ECOMMENDA - bridge them together. Hence, we have truster-feature matrix
TION M ODEL P d×m and trustee-feature matrix W d×m . By employing the
low-rank matrix approximation, we can recover the trust
In this section, we first mathematically define the recom- matrix by T ≈ P > W . Thus, a trust relationship can be
mendation problem in social rating networks, and then predicted by the inner product of a truster-specific vector
introduce the TrustSVD model in detail. and a trustee-specific vector t̂u,v = wv> pu . The matrices P
and W can be learned by minimizing the following loss

function: Implicit Influence of Trusting Users. Figure 2b shows that
1 2 λ the trusting users of an active user can also influence the
wv> pu −tu,v +
X X X X
Lt = kpu k2F + kwv k2F , rating prediction for a certain item. In fact, Observation 3 has
2 u 2 u v
v∈Tu+ indicated that such influence may be comparable with that
+ of trusted users. Similarly, the effect can be considered by
where Tu is the set of users trusted by user u, i.e., the set of
modelling user preference, given by:
out-going trusted users.
1 X 1 X
In summary, by mapping both rating matrix and trust r̂u,j = bu,j + qj> pu + |Iu |− 2 yi + |Tu− |− 2 pk ,
matrix into the same d-dimensional space, we can link the i∈Iu k∈Tu−
two kinds of information together and thus aim to predict
an item’s rating r̂u,j as accurate as possible. where Tu− is the set of users who trust user u, i.e., the
set of her trusters. Thus, qj> pk can be explained by the
ratings predicted by the trusting users, i.e., the influence
4.2 The TrustSVD Model of trusters on the predictions. Similarly, the inner product
In line with the three observations of the previous section, qj> pk indicates how trusting users k influence user u’s rating
our TrustSVD model is built on top of a state-of-the-art on item j . An intuitive understanding has been illustrated
model known as SVD++ proposed by Koren [12]. The ratio- in Figure 2b. Similar to ratings, a user’s feature vector can
nale behind SVD++ is to take into consideration user/item be interpreted by the set of users whom trust her, i.e.,
1 P
biases and the influence of rated items other than user/item- |Tu− |− 2 k∈T − pk . Therefore, a user u is further modeled
u
specific vectors on rating prediction. Formally, the rating for by pu + |Iu |− 12 P − − 12
P
i∈Iu yi + |Tu | k∈Tu− pk in the social
user u on item j is predicted by: rating networks, considering the influence of both rated
1 X items and trusting users.
r̂u,j = bu + bj + µ + qj> pu + |Iu |− 2

yi ,
i∈Iu
Combinational Implicit Trust Influence. The implicit in-
where bu , bj represent the rating bias of user u and item j , fluence of trust neighbors on rating prediction therefore
respectively; µ is the global average rating; and yi denotes consists of two parts: the influence of both trustees and
the implicit influence of items rated by user u in the past on trusters. To consider both cases, we propose the following
the ratings of unknown items in the future. Thus, user u’s fusion approaches.
feature vector can be also represented by the set of items
she (1) Linear Combination. A natural and straightforward
1 P
rated, and finally modeled as pu + |Iu |− 2 i∈Iu yi rather way is to linearly combine the two kinds of implicit trust
than simply as pu . Koren [12] has shown that integrating influence, given by:
implicit influence of ratings can well improve predictive 1 X
accuracy. Previously, we have stressed the importance of r̂u,j = bu,j + qj> pu + |Iu |− 2 yi (1)
trust influence for better recommendations, and its potential i∈Iu
1 1

α|Tu+ |− 2 wv + (1 − α)|Tu− |− 2
X X
to be generalized to trust-alike relationships. Hence, we can + pk ,
enhance the trust-unaware SVD++ model by incorporating v∈Tu+ k∈Tu−
both the explicit and implicit influence of trust, described as
follows. where α ∈ [0, 1] controls the importance of influence of
trustees in rating prediction. Specifically, α = 0 means that
Implicit Influence of Trusted Users. Figure 2a shows that we only consider the influence of trusting users; α = 1
the trusted users of an active user have an effect on rating indicates that only the influence of trusted users are consid-
prediction for a certain item. We take into account this effect ered; and α ∈ (0, 1) mixes the two kinds of trust influence
by modelling user preference in the same manner as rated together. In the case of undirected social relationships (e.g.,
items, given by: friendship in Flixster), Tu+ will be equivalent with Tu− , and
thus the linear combination ensures that our model can be
1 X 1 X
r̂u,j = bu,j + qj> pu + |Iu |− 2 yi + |Tu+ |− 2 wv , applied to both trust and trust-alike relationships.
i∈Iu v∈Tu+
(2) All as Trusting Users. In a trust relationship, a user u
can be represented either by pu as trustor or by wu as trustee.
where bu,j = bu + bj + µ hereafter represents bias terms, wv An alternative way is to model the influence of user u’s
is the user-specific latent feature vector of users (trustees) trust neighbors, including both trusted and trusting users,
trusted by user u, and thus qj> wv can be explained by the in the manner of trusting users such that we can yield the
ratings predicted by the trusted users, i.e., the influence of following function:
trustees on the rating prediction. In other words, the inner 1 X 1 X

product qj> wv indicates how trusted users influence user r̂u,j = bu,j + qj> pu + |Iu |− 2 yi + |Tu |− 2 pk , (2)
u’s rating on item j . An intuitive understanding has been i∈Iu k∈Tu
illustrated in Figure 2a. Similar to ratings, a user’s feature where Tu = ∪ Tu+ Tu−
denotes the set of user u’s trust
vector can be interpreted by the set of users whom she neighbors. The underlying assumption is not to distinguish
1 P
trusts, i.e., |Tu+ |− 2 v∈Tu+ wv . Therefore, a user u is further the roles of trust neighbors, but to treat them uniformly in
1 P 1 P
modeled by pu + |Iu |− 2 i∈Iu yi + |Tu+ |− 2 v∈Tu+ wv in

terms of implicit trust influence.
the social rating networks, considering the influence of both (3) All as Trusted Users. With the same assumption, we
rated items and trusted users. may model the influence of all trust neighbors in the manner
of trusted users. That is, we predict the user’s possible rating over-fitted). As a result, the new loss function to minimize
on a target item by: is obtained as follows:
1 X 1 X
1 XX 2
r̂u,j = bu,j + qj> pu + |Iu |− 2 yi + |Tu |− 2 wv , (3) L= r̂u,j − ru,j (4)
2 u j∈I
i∈Iu v∈Tu u
where Tu is the set of user u’s trust neighbors. Both Equa- λt X X 2 X 2

+ α t̂u,v − tu,v + (1 − α) t̂k,u − tk,u
tions 2 and 3 will also influence the decomposition of trust 2 u + −
v∈Tu k∈Tu
relationships. However, since user-feature matrix P plays λX 1 λX 1
a key role in bridging both rating and trust information, + |Iu |− 2 b2u + |Uj |− 2 b2j
the rating prediction by Equation 2 may lead to a better
2 u 2 j
performance than that by Equation 3. Xλ 1 λt 1

1
With the consideration of implicit trust influence, the + |Iu |− 2 + δ(α)|Tu+ |− 2 +δ(1−α)|Tu− |− 2 kpu k2F
u
2 2
objective function to minimize is then given as follows:
λ 1 λX 1
|Uj |− 2 kqj k2F + |Ui |− 2 kyi k2F
X
1 XX 2 λ X 2 X 2 +
L= r̂u,j − ru,j + b + bj 2 j 2 i
2 u j∈I 2 u u
u j λ XX 1
X X X X + δ(α)|Tv+ |− 2 kwv k2F
+ kpu k2F + kqj k2F + kyi k2F + kwv k2F , 2 u +
v∈Tu
u j i v
λXX 1
where r̂u,j is the prediction computed by Equation 1. To + δ(1 − α)|Tk− |− 2 kpk k2F ,
2 u −
reduce the model complexity, we use the same regulariza- k∈Tu
tion parameter λ for all the variables. Finer control and where Uj , Ui are the set of users who rate items j and i,
tuning can be achieved by assigning separate regularization respectively; and δ(x) is an indicator function which equals
1
parameters to different variables, though it may result in 1 if x > 0, and 0 otherwise. Specifically, we multiple |Iu |− 2
greater complexity in model learning, and in comparison (i.e., number of items rated) to variables related to users
with other matrix factorization models. including pu and bu . The same holds for items’ variables,
namely qj , qi and bj . Besides, since the active users may
Explicit Trust Influence. In addition, as explained earlier, be socially connected with other trust neighbors, the pe-
we constrain that the user-specific vectors decomposed from nalization on user-specific vector pu takes into account two
the rating matrix and those decomposed from the trust cases: trusted by others |Tu− | and trusting other users |Tu+ |.
matrix share the same feature space in order to bridge both Similarly, we take into account the number of trusted and
matrices together. In this way, these two types of informa- trusting users for variables pk and wv , respectively.
tion can be exploited in a unified recommendation model.
Specifically, we can regularize the user-specific vectors pu by
4.3 Model Learning
recovering the social relationships with other users. The new
objective function (without the other regularization terms) is To obtain a local minimization of the objective function
given by: given by Equation 4, we perform the following gradient
descents on bu , bj , pu , qj , yi , wv and pk across all the users
1XX 2 λ t X X 2
and items in a training data set.
L= r̂u,j − ru,j + α t̂u,v −tu,v
2 u j∈I 2 u 1
v∈Tu+ ∂L
eu,j + λ|Iu |− 2 bu
P
∂bu =
u
X 2 j∈Iu
+ (1 − α) t̂k,u − tk,u , ∂L 1
eu,j + λ|Uj |− 2 bj
P
∂bj =
k∈Tu− u∈Uj
1
∂L
where t̂u,v = wv> pu is the predicted trust between users u eu,v wv + λ|Iu |− 2
P P
∂pu = eu,j qj + λt α
and v computed by the inner product of truster and trustee j∈Iu v∈Tu +
1 1

vectors, i.e., wv> pu . Similarly, t̂k,u = wu> pk is the predicted +λt δ(α)|Tu+ |− 2 + δ(1 − α)|Tu− |− 2 pu
trust for user k towards user u, and λt controls the degree ∂L
1 P 1 P
eu,j pu + |Iu |− 2 yi + α|Tu+ |− 2
P
of trust regularization. ∂qj = wv
u∈Uj i∈Iu v∈Tu
+
(5)
1 P
1
Adaptive Regularization. Further, as suggested by Yang +(1 − α)|Tu− |− 2 pk +λ|Uj |− 2 qj
et al. [8], a technique called weighted-λ-regularization can k∈Tu−
∂L 1 1
eu,j |Iu |− 2 qj + λ|Ui |− 2 yi
P
be used to help avoid over-fitting when learning model ∀i ∈ Iu , ∂y i
=
j∈Iu
parameters. In particular, they consider more penalties for ∂L 1
∀v ∈ Tu+ , ∂w eu,j α|Tu+ |− 2 qj + λt αeu,v pu
P
=
the users who rated more items and for the items which v
j∈Iu
1
received more ratings. However, we argue that such con- +λδ(α)|Tv+ |− 2 wv
sideration may force the model to be more biased towards 1
∂L
∀k ∈ Tu− , ∂p eu,j (1 − α)|Tu− |− 2 qj
P
popular users and items. Instead, in this work we adopt a k
=
j∈Iu
distinct strategy that the popular users and items should be 1
+λt (1 − α)ek,u wu + λδ(1 − α)|Tk− |− 2 pk
less penalized (due to smaller chance to be over-fitted), and
cold-start users and niche items (those receiving few ratings) where eu,j = r̂u,j − ru,j indicates the rating prediction error
should be more regularized (due to greater chance to be for user u on item j , and eu,v = t̂u,v − tu,v is the trust
Algorithm 1: Learning in the TrustSVD model and of social trust information when predicting users’ rat-
Input : R, T, d, λ, λt , γ (learning rate) ings for unknown items. Specifically, for ratings, the explicit
Output: Rating predictions r̂u,j information is the rating values which are approximated
by the inner product qj> pu of user- and item-specific latent
1 Initialize vectors Bu , Bj and matrices P, Q, Y, W with feature vectors, while the implicit influence is represented
small and random values in (0, 1); by qj> yi regarding the effect of rated items by the active
2 while L not converged do users. Similarly, for trust statements, the explicit information
3 compute gradients according to Equation 5; is the trust values that are predicted by the inner product
∂L
4 bu ← bu − γ ∂b u
,u = 1...m wv> pu of truster- and trustee-specific latent feature vectors.
∂L
5 bj ← bj − γ ∂bj , j = 1 . . . n To bridge the rating and trust matrices together, we limit
6 pu ← pu − γ ∂p ∂L
,u = 1...m the user/truster vector to be the same pu . The implicit
u
7
∂L
qj ← qj − γ ∂qj , j = 1 . . . n influence of trust neighbors can be further split into two
∂L parts: trustees’ influence is modelled by the inner product
8 ∀i ∈ Iu , yi ← yi − γ ∂y i
,u = 1...m qj> wv while trusters’ influence is given by the inner prod-
+ ∂L
9 ∀v ∈ Tu , wv ← wv − γ ∂w v
,u = 1...m uct qj> pk . Since the state-of-the-art model SVD++ naturally
− ∂L
10 ∀k ∈ Tu , pk ← pk − γ ∂pk , u = 1 . . . m incorporates the implicit influence of item ratings, we build
11 return Bu , Bj , P, Q, Y, W ; on top of this model by further incorporating the implicit
influence of trust neighbors as well as the explicit one.
Therefore, compared with other models, TrustSVD enables
more information (both implicit and explicit) for rating pre-
prediction error for user u towards trustee v as well as diction, resulting in better recommendation performance.
ek,u = t̂k,u − tk,u for truster k towards user u. In the cold-start situations where users may have only
The pseudocode for model learning is given in Algorith- rated a few items, the decomposition of trust matrix can help
m 1. To explain, several arguments are taken as input, in- to learn more reliable user-specific latent feature vectors
cluding user-item rating matrix R, user-user trust matrix T , than ratings-only matrix factorization. In the extreme case
regularization parameters λ and λt , and the initial learning where there are no ratings at all for some users, Equation 5
rate γ . First, we randomly initialize the decomposed vectors ensures that the user-specific vector can be trained and
and matrices with small values (line 1). Then, we keep learned from the trust matrix. In this regard, incorporating
training the model until the loss function is converged (line trust in a matrix factorization model can alleviate the cold
2). Specifically, we compute variable gradients according start problem. By considering both explicit and implicit
to Equation 5 (line 3), and then update variables by the influence of trust rather than either one, our model can
gradient descent method (lines 4-10). Finally, we return the better utilize trust to further mitigate the data sparsity and
learned vectors and matrices as output (line 11). cold start issues.
4.4 Complexity Analysis 5 E VALUATION

The computational time of learning the TrustSVD model is In this section, we conduct a series of experiments in order
mainly taken by evaluating the objective function L and to investigate the effectiveness of our approach in compari-
its gradients against feature vectors (variables). The time son with other counterparts across four data sets.
to compute the objective function L is O(d|R| + d|T |),
where d is the dimensionality of the feature space, and 5.1 Experimental Settings
|R|, |T | refer to the number of observed entries. Due to
Data Sets. The four data sets presented in Table 1 are used.
the sparsity of rating and trust matrices, the values will
be much smaller than the matrix cardinality. The com- Testing Views. Two data set views are created for testing.
∂L ∂L ∂L ∂L First, the All view indicates that all ratings are used as the
putational complexities for gradients ∂b u
, ∂b j
, ∂p u
, ∂q j
,
∂L ∂L ∂L test set. Second, the Cold Start view means that only the
∂yi , ∂wv , ∂pk in Equation 5 are O(d|R|), O(d|R|), O(d|R| +
users who rate less than five items will be involved in the
d|T |), O(d|R| + d|T |), O(d|R|k), O(d|R|p+ + d|T |p+ ) and
test set. Similar testing views are also defined and used
O(d|R|p− + d|T |p− ), where k, p+ , p− are the average num-
in [4], [8]. We use 5-fold cross-validation for learning and
ber of ratings received by an item, trust statements given
testing. Specifically, we randomly split each data set into five
and received by a user, respectively. Hence, the overall com-
folds and in each iteration four folds are used as the training
putational complexity in one iteration is O(d|R|c + d|T |c),
set and the remaining fold as the test set. Five iterations will
where c = max(p+ , p− , k). Due to c |R| or |T |, the
be conducted to ensure that all folds are tested. Then, the
overall computational time is linear with respect to the
average test performance is given as the final result. In the
number of observations in the rating and trust matrices. It
Cold Start view, 5-fold cross validation is still used but we
follows that our model has potential to scale up to large-
only care about the performance for cold-start users.
scale data sets. Section 5.7 will investigate the scalability of
our approach in four real-world data sets. Evaluation Metrics. We adopt two well-known metrics to
evaluate predictive accuracy, namely mean absolute error
4.5 Insights into the TrustSVD Model (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE), defined by:
sP
2
P
The key idea behind the TrustSVD model is to take into u,j |r̂u,j − ru,j | u,j (r̂u,j − ru,j )
account both explicit and implicit influences of item ratings MAE = , RMSE = ,
N N
0.620 0.806 0.724 0.726
0.618
0.805 0.723
0.616 0.725
0.614 0.804 0.722
MAE
MAE
MAE
MAE
0.612 0.724
0.803 0.721
0.610
0.802 0.720
0.608 0.723
0.606 0.801 0.719

10−5 10−4 10−3 10−2 10−1 100 10−5 10−4 10−3 10−2 10−1 100 10−5 10−4 10−3 10−2 10−1 100 10−5 10−4 10−3 10−2 10−1 100
λt λt λt λt
(a) FilmTrust (b) Epinions (c) Flixster (d) Ciao
Fig. 3: The effect of parameter trust regularization λt across all the data sets [d = 10].
0.610 0.812 0.735 0.730
0.810
0.609 0.730 0.728
0.808
0.608 0.725 0.726
MAE
MAE
MAE
MAE
0.806
0.607 0.720 0.724
0.804
0.606 0.715 0.722

0.802
0.605 0.800 0.710 0.720

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
α α α α
Fig. 4: The effect of parameter trustee’s importance α across all the data sets [d = 10].
where N is the number of test ratings. Smaller values of λ = 0.1 for Ciao. Parameters λt , α will be elaborated next.
MAE and RMSE indicate better predictive accuracy. Besides,
since RMSE puts relatively high weights on large errors and 5.2 Impact of Parameters λt and α
all comparison models (except the baselines) adopt the least Other than the parameter λ, two more parameters are used
square errors as loss function, RMSE is more appropriate in our method, namely parameter λt for the importance of
than MAE to measure the predictive performance for our trust regularization and parameter α for the relative impor-
work. In addition, the larger the difference between MAE tance of influence of trustees. To determine their values for
and RMSE, the greater the variance of predictive errors. different data sets, we first fix the value of one parameter,
Comparison Methods. Up to ten recommendation models and then adjust the values of the other to search the best
are compared with TrustSVD in our experiments, including parameter settings. Specifically, we tune the parameter λt in
(1) UAvg, IAvg are baselines that predict a user’s rating by the range {10−5 , 10−4 , 10−3 , 10−2 , 10−1 , 100 } whiling fixing
the average of her historical ratings, and of ratings received α = 0.5, i.e., equal importance of both influence of trustees
by the target item, respectively; (2) PMF is a basic probabilis- and trusters. The results are illustrated in Figure 3 in terms
tic matrix factorization model proposed by Salakhutdinov of MAE when d = 10. The other settings (e.g, d = 5 or
and Mnih [21]; (3) RSTE [22], SoRec [5] and SoReg [6] in terms of RMSE) show similar performance trends. MAE
are earlier trust-based recommendation models by Ma et is adopted since it gives clearer changes of recommendation
al.; (4) SocialMF [7], TrustMF [8], Fang’s [9] are latest performance. The results clearly indicate that a proper value
and state-of-the-art trust-based models that are reported to of λt for different data sets can help improve the recom-
achieve better performance than simple baselines and other mendation performance. Generally, a value 0.1 would give
counterparts [8], [9]; (4) SVD++ [12] is a state-of-the-art relatively fair performance if necessary.
After determining λt ’s values, we proceed to tune the
recommendation method merely based on ratings, and also
value of parameter α in [0, 1] with step 0.1. Parameter
adopted as a key comparison method in Fang et al. [9].
α = 1 indicates that only the influence of trustees is taken
Parameter Settings. The optimal experimental settings for into account while α = 0 means that only the influence
all the models are determined either by our experiments of trusters is considered in our method. The results are
or suggested by previous works. Specifically, the common presented in Figure 4. We observe that the performance of
settings are λ = 0.001, and the number of latent features the extreme value α = 0 is inferior to α = 1 in FilmTrust,
d = 5/10, the same as all the previous trust-based models. but performs better in the other data sets. In this respect, the
The other settings are: (1) RSTE: α = 0.4 for Epinions, impact is domain-specific. Nevertheless, the performance of
and 1.0 for the others; (2) SoRec: λc = 0.1, 1.0, 0.001, 0.01 α = 0 and α = 1 is much worse than the performance
corresponding to FilmTrust, Epinions, Flixster and Ciao, of other values. In other words, a proper combination of
respectively; (3) SoReg: β = 1.0 for Flixster and 0.1 for both the influence of trusters and trustees leads to better
the others; (4) SocialMF, TrustMF: λt = 1; (5) SVD++: recommendation performance. Although the best value of α
λ = 0.1, 0.35, 0.03, 0.1 (resp.); (6) TrustSVD: λ = 0.6 for that reaches the superior performance may vary in different
FilmTrust, λ = 1 for Epinions, λ = 0.6 for Flixster, and data sets, a value of 0.6 in general is a fair setting.
0.620 0.82 0.76 0.735

Linear Combination Linear Combination Linear Combination Linear Combination
All as Trusting Users All as Trusting Users 0.75 All as Trusting Users All as Trusting Users
0.730
0.615 All as Trusted Users 0.81 All as Trusted Users All as Trusted Users All as Trusted Users
0.74
0.73 0.725
MAE
MAE
MAE
MAE
0.610 0.80
0.72 0.720
0.71
0.605 0.79
0.715
0.70
0.600 0.78 0.69 0.710

5 10 5 10 5 10 5 10
Number of Latent Factors Number of Latent Factors Number of Latent Factors Number of Latent Factors
Fig. 5: The effect of different ways to combine the implicit influence of both trusting and trusted users.
TABLE 2: Comparison of the traditional L2 and our adap- provide superior accuracy than ratings-only counterparts.
tive (in bold) regularization in the testing view of ‘All’, On the contrary, our approach TrustSVD is consistently
where the top rows are in MAE and the bottom in RMSE. superior to the best approach among the others across all
FilmTrust Epinions Flixster Ciao
the data sets. Although the percentage of relative improve-
d = 5 d = 10 d = 5 d = 10 d = 5 d = 10 d = 5 d = 10 ments is small (around 3.17% in RMSE on the average),
0.615 0.613 0.804 0.805 0.721 0.723 0.726 0.727 Koren [11] has pointed out that even small improvements
0.611 0.609 0.802 0.803 0.720 0.720 0.723 0.724 in MAE and RMSE may lead to significant differences of
0.799 0.797 1.050 1.052 0.948 0.949 0.960 0.964 recommendations in practice. For example, the Netflix prize
0.794 0.792 1.048 1.049 0.943 0.942 0.956 0.957 (netflixprize.com) competition offered 1M dollar for 10%
improvements in RMSE. Note that among all the trust-based
approaches, SoReg is the only one method that achives
5.3 Comparison of Trust Influence Combination significant improvements when tuning the number of latent
We have compared the different ways to combine the influ- factors from 5 to 10. This is due to no trust decomposition
ence of trust influence. The results are illustrated in Figure 5. in this model. To have a fairer comparison, we compare the
It shows that linear combination consistently achieves better best performance of SoReg (by tuning d ∈ [5, 50] with step
accuracy than All as Trusting Users which in turn outper- 5) with TrustSVD (see Table 5). The results also verify the
forms All as Trusted Users. It implies that: (1) it is better effectiveness of our approach.
to distinguish the role of trusting and trusted users; and For all the comparison methods in the testing view of
(2) modeling all social neighbors as trusting users is more Cold Start, SoRec and SVD++ perform respectively the best
effective than as trusted users, since user vector pu functions in FilmTrust and Flixster (trust-alike), while no single ap-
as a pivot in bridging both rating and trust information. proach works the best in Epinions and Ciao (trust). General-
ly, our approach performs better than the others both in trust
and trust-alike relationships. Although some exceptions are
5.4 Impact of Adaptive Regularization
observed in Epinions in MAE, TrustSVD is more powerful in
Adaptive regularization is adopted in Equation 4 to help RMSE. Since all the trust-based models aim to optimize the
avoid over-fitting. We study its impact on predictive ac- square errors between predictions and real values, RMSE is
curacy in comparison with the strategy of traditional L2- more indicative than MAE, and thus TrustSVD still has the
regularization. The best parameter settings from the previ- best performance overall. As discussed in Section 4.5, it is
ous analysis are taken in this part. The results on the four essential for our model to handle the data sparsity and cold
data sets are presented in Table 2. Generally, the average start by considering both the explicit and implicit influence
improvements our adaptive regularization achieves relative of ratings and trust.
to traditional regularization are around 0.00275 in MAE and Besides the above-compared approaches, some new
0.00475 in RMSE, demonstrating the usefulness of finer- trust-based models have been proposed recently. The most
grained regularization techniques. relevant model is presented in [9]; for clarity, we denote it by
Fang’s. It is reported to perform better than other trust-based
5.5 Comparison with Other Models models and than SVD++ (except in Ciao). Table 6 shows the
The experimental results are presented in Tables 3 and 4, comparison between Fang’s and our approach TrustSVD.
corresponding to the testing views of All and Cold Start, The results of Fang’s approach are reported in [9],8 and
respectively. For all the comparison methods in the testing directly re-used in our article. Note that we sampled more
view of All, SVD++ outperforms the other comparison data for Flixster than Fang’s, and thus their experimental
methods in FilmTrust and Epinions, and UAvg performs results are not comparable. Table 6 clearly shows that our
the best in Flixster. This implies that these trust-based ap- approach performs better than Fang’s in terms of both MAE
proaches cannot always beat other well-performing ratings- and RMSE.
only approaches, and even simple baselines in trust-alike One more observation from Tables 3, 4 and 6 is that the
networks (i.e., FilmTrust and Flixster). Only in Ciao, trust- performance of TrustSVD when d = 5 is very close to that
based approach (SocialMF) gives the best performance. In 8. Since only the results in ‘All’ are reported and no results reported
a word, previous trust-based approaches cannot always in the case of Cold Start, we do not merge them in Tables 3 and 4.
TABLE 3: Performance comparison in the testing view of ‘All’, where * indicates the best performance among all the other
methods, and column ‘Improve’ indicates the percentage of improvements that TrustSVD achieves relative to the * results.
All Metrics UAvg IAvg PMF RSTE SoRec SoReg SocialMF TrustMF SVD++ TrustSVD Improve
FilmTrust MAE 0.636 0.725 0.714 0.628 0.628 0.661 0.638 0.631 0.613* 0.607 0.98%
d=5 RMSE 0.823 0.927 0.949 0.810 0.810 0.866 0.837 0.810 0.804* 0.791 1.62%
MAE 0.636 0.725 0.735 0.640 0.638 0.644 0.642 0.631 0.611* 0.605 0.98%
d = 10 RMSE 0.823 0.927 0.968 0.835 0.831 0.838 0.844 0.819 0.802* 0.789 1.62%
Epinions MAE 0.930 0.928 0.979 0.950 0.882 0.996 0.825 0.818 0.818* 0.803 1.83%
d=5 RMSE 1.203 1.094 1.290 1.196 1.114 1.304 1.070 1.069 1.057* 1.043 1.32%
MAE 0.930 0.928 0.909 0.958 0.884 0.906 0.826 0.819 0.818* 0.803 1.83%
d = 10 RMSE 1.203 1.094 1.197 1.278 1.142 1.182 1.082 1.095 1.057* 1.044 1.23%
Flixster MAE 0.729* 0.858 0.814 0.751 0.750 0.825 0.770 0.890 0.794 0.719 1.37%
d=5 RMSE 0.979* 1.088 1.076 0.975 0.974 1.088 0.994 1.146 1.062 0.942 3.88%
MAE 0.729* 0.858 0.769 0.784 0.785 0.774 0.784 1.116 0.821 0.719 1.37%
d = 10 RMSE 0.979* 1.088 1.009 1.015 1.018 1.016 1.009 1.441 1.091 0.941 3.88%
Ciao MAE 0.781 0.760 0.920 0.767 0.765 0.899 0.749 0.742* 0.752 0.723 2.56%
d=5 RMSE 1.031 1.026 1.206 1.020 1.013 1.183 0.981* 0.983 1.013 0.956 2.55%
MAE 0.781 0.760 0.822 0.763 0.761 0.812 0.749* 0.753 0.748 0.723 3.47%
d = 10 RMSE 1.031 1.026 1.078 1.013 1.010 1.073 0.976* 1.014 1.001 0.956 2.05%
TABLE 4: Performance comparison in the testing view of ‘Cold Start’.
Cold Start Metrics UAvg IAvg PMF RSTE SoRec SoReg SocialMF TrustMF SVD++ TrustSVD Improve
FilmTrust MAE 0.709 0.722 0.814 0.680 0.670* 0.881 0.697 0.674 0.677 0.655 2.24%
d=5 RMSE 0.979 0.911 1.079 0.884 0.857* 1.104 0.916 0.867 0.897 0.839 2.10%
MAE 0.709 0.722 0.767 0.674 0.668* 0.771 0.680 0.687 0.680 0.659 1.35%
d = 10 RMSE 0.979 0.911 1.009 0.900 0.897* 1.034 0.907 0.900 0.905 0.847 5.57%
Epinions MAE 1.047 0.852* 1.451 1.051 0.892 1.398 0.884 0.891 0.889 0.869 -1.99%
d=5 RMSE 1.430 1.127 1.770 1.266 1.138 1.735 1.133 1.125* 1.162 1.104 1.87%
MAE 1.047 0.852 1.153 0.981 0.846* 1.139 0.857 0.853 0.891 0.868 -2.60%
d = 10 RMSE 1.430 1.127* 1.432 1.313 1.180 1.437 1.152 1.176 1.166 1.105 1.95%
Flixster MAE 0.869 0.906 1.097 0.872 0.872 1.058 0.881 0.901 0.868* 0.844 2.76%
d=5 RMSE 1.155 1.114 1.390 1.097 1.096* 1.358 1.103 1.138 1.122 1.056 3.65%
MAE 0.869* 0.906 0.949 0.889 0.892 0.951 0.884 0.976 0.869* 0.846 2.65%
d = 10 RMSE 1.155 1.114 1.206 1.137 1.144 1.218 1.112* 1.328 1.112* 1.059 4.77%
Ciao MAE 0.829 0.735* 1.033 0.957 0.789 1.173 0.774 0.752 0.759 0.726 1.22%
d=5 RMSE 1.138 1.005 1.334 1.113 0.998 1.430 1.001 0.954* 1.039 0.940 1.47%
MAE 0.829 0.735 0.926 0.803 0.730* 0.949 0.741 0.770 0.749 0.725 0.68%
d = 10 RMSE 1.138 1.005 1.191 1.014 1.031 1.214 0.978* 1.096 1.020 0.939 3.99%
TABLE 5: Comparing with the best performance of SoReg TABLE 6: Performance comparing with Fang’s approach
SoReg TrustSVD SoReg TrustSVD Fang’s vs. Epinions Ciao FilmTrust

FilmTrust 0.637 0.607 Epinions 0.846 0.803 TrustSVD d = 5 d = 10 d = 5 d = 10 d = 5 d = 10
d = 15 0.834 0.791 d = 20 1.130 1.043 0.806 0.814 0.737 0.745 0.616 0.625
MAE
0.804 0.805 0.723 0.723 0.607 0.605
Flixster 0.774 0.719 Ciao 0.776 0.719 1.047 1.059 0.972 0.985 0.793 0.810
d = 10 1.016 0.942 d = 20 1.044 0.941 RMSE
1.043 1.044 0.956 0.956 0.791 0.789
when d = 10, indicating the reliability of our approach

approach with other trust-based counterparts, i.e., RSTE,
with respect to the feature dimensionality. We ascribe this
SoRec, SoReg, SocialMF and TrustMF.9 The trust degrees
feature to the consideration of both the explicit and implicit
refer to the summation of the number of trusted neighbors
influence of item ratings and social trust in a unified recom-
specified by a user (i.e., out degree) and the number of
mendation model.
In conclusion, the experimental results indicate that our trusting neighbors who trust the user (i.e., in degree). We
approach TrustSVD outperforms the other methods in pre- split the trust degrees into (up to seven) categories: 1-5, 6-
dicting more accurate ratings, and that its performance is 10, 11-20, 21-40, 41-100, 101-500, >500 as used by Yang et
reliable with different numbers of latent features. al. [8]. The results of trust-based models are illustrated in
Figure 6 in the case of d = 5 in MAE. It is observed that
5.6 Comparison in Trust Degrees our approach TrustSVD consistently outperforms the other
trust-based models in terms of both MAE and RMSE across
Another series of experiments are conducted to investi-
gate the performance on users with different trust de- 9. Other trust-unaware methods (e.g., SVD++, PMF) are not used in
grees, in order to further compare the performance of our the experiments.
0.95 1.20
RSTE SoRec SoReg 1.00
RSTE SoRec RSTE SoRec SoReg RSTE SoRec SoReg
0.90 SocialMF TrustMF TrustSVD SocialMF TrustMF TrustSVD SocialMF TrustMF TrustSVD
SoReg SocialMF 0.95
1.10
TrustMF TrustSVD
0.85 0.90
0.80 1.00
MAE
0.85
MAE
MAE
MAE
0.80
0.75
0.90
0.70 0.75
0.70
0.80
0.65
0.60 0.70 0.65 0.60

1-5 6-10 11-20 21-40 41-100 101-500 1-5 6-10 11-20 21-40 41-100 101-500 >500 1-5 6-10 11-20 21-40 41-100 101-500 >500 1-5 6-10 11-20 21-40 41-100 101-500 >500
Trust Degree Trust Degree Trust Degree Trust Degree
Fig. 6: Performance comparison on users with different trust degrees across data sets (d = 5) [Best viewed in color]
23 150 36 30
34
20 32
130 25
Training Time (seconds)
30
Training Time (minutes)

28
17
110 26 20
24
14
22
90 15
20
11 18
70 16 10
8 14
12
5 50 5
10
8
2 30 6 0
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
Training Ratio Training Ratio Training Ratio Training Ratio
Fig. 7: The scalability of our approach across all the data sets [d = 10], where (a) is in seconds and the others are in minutes.
all the data sets. The statistic significance tests (paired t-tests, feature vectors. Computational complexity of TrustSVD in-
confidence 0.95) between our approach TrustSVD and other dicated its capability of scaling up to large-scale data sets.
comparison models are conducted10 , and show that our ap- Comprehensive experimental results on the four real-world
proach TrustSVD in general achieves statistically significant data sets showed that our approach TrustSVD outperformed
performance relative to other methods. It is noted that the both trust- and ratings-based methods (ten models in total)
predictive accuracy on FilmTrust decreases along with the in predictive accuracy across different testing views and
increment of trust degrees. One possible explanation is that across users with different trust degrees. We concluded that
much noise is arose from converting real-valued trust to our approach can better alleviate the data sparsity and cold
binary trust. Thus, the social relationships may be less useful start problems of recommender systems.
in FilmTrust than in the others as indicated in [9]. As a rating prediction model, TrustSVD works well by
incorporating trust influence. However, the literature has
5.7 Scalability shown that models for rating prediction cannot suit the task
of top-N item recommendation. For future work, we intend
We proceed to investigate the scalability of TrustSVD in
to study how trust can influence the ranking score of an item
terms of training time when being applied to different
(both explicitly and implicitly). The ranking order between
percentages of data sets. Specifically, we vary the percent-
a rated item and an unrated item (but rated by trust users)
ages from 0.1 to 1 stepping by 0.1 in each data set. The
may be critical to learn users’ ranking patterns.
results, illustrated in Figure 7, show that the training time
increases linearly with the amount of training data. Hence,
our approach can be applied to large-scale data sets. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work is supported by the MoE AcRF Tier 2 Grant
M4020110.020, and National Natural Science Foundation of
6 C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK China under Grant No. 61402097. NYS thanks the Operations
This article proposed a novel trust-based matrix factoriza- group at the Cambridge Judge Business School and the fellow-
tion model which incorporated both rating and trust infor- ship at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge.
mation. Our analysis of trust in four real-world data sets
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A Novel Recommendation Model

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A Novel Recommendation Model

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A Novel Recommendation Model Regularized

R ECOMMENDER systems have been widely used to pro-

0.2 0.1 0.1

(a) (b) (c)

4.1 Problem Definition

and W can be learned by minimizing the following loss

where Tu is the set of user u’s trust neighbors. Both Equa- λt X X 2 X 2 

4.4 Complexity Analysis 5 E VALUATION

0.620 0.806 0.724 0.726

0.614 0.804 0.722

0.606 0.801 0.719

(a) FilmTrust (b) Epinions (c) Flixster (d) Ciao

0.610 0.812 0.735 0.730

0.606 0.715 0.722

0.605 0.800 0.710 0.720

(a) FilmTrust (b) Epinions (c) Flixster (d) Ciao

0.620 0.82 0.76 0.735

0.600 0.78 0.69 0.710

(a) FilmTrust (b) Epinions (c) Flixster (d) Ciao

TABLE 4: Performance comparison in the testing view of ‘Cold Start’.

SoReg TrustSVD SoReg TrustSVD Fang’s vs. Epinions Ciao FilmTrust

when d = 10, indicating the reliability of our approach

0.60 0.70 0.65 0.60

(a) FilmTrust (b) Epinions (c) Flixster (d) Ciao

Training Time (minutes)

Training Time (minutes)

(a) FilmTrust (b) Epinions (c) Flixster (d) Ciao

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where Tu is the set of user u’s trust neighbors. Both Equa- λt X X 2 X 2