Power to the people : exploring neighbourhood formations in social recommender systems

The explosive growth of online social networks in recent times has presented a powerful source of information to be utilised in personalised recommendations. Unsurprisingly there has already been a large body of work completed in the recommender system field to incorporate this social in- formation into the recommendation process. In this paper we examine the practice of leveraging a user’s social graph in order to generate recommendations. Using various neighbourhood selection strategies, we examine the user satisfaction and the level of perceived trust in the recommendations received.