A Bipartite Graph-Based Recommender for Crowdfunding with Sparse Data

Abstract

It is a common problem facing recommender to sparse data dealing, especially for crowdfunding recommendations. The collaborative filtering (CF) tends to recommend a user those items only connecting to similar users directly but fails to recommend the items with indirect actions to similar users. Therefore, CF performs poorly in the case of sparse data like Kickstarter. We propose a method of enabling indirect crowdfunding campaign recommendation based on bipartite graph. PersonalRank is applicable to calculate global similarity; as opposed to local similarity, for any node of the network, we use PersonalRank in an iterative manner to produce recommendation list where CF is invalid. Furthermore, we propose a bipartite graph-based CF model by combining CF and PersonalRank. The new model classifies nodes into one of the following two types: user nodes and campaign nodes. For any two types of nodes, the global similarity between them is calculated by PersonalRank. Finally, a recommendation list is generated for any node through CF algorithm. Experimental results show that the bipartite graph-based CF achieves better performance in recommendation for the extremely sparse data from crowdfunding campaigns.