HCoF: Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Using Social and Semantic Suggestions for Friend Recommendation

Abstract

Today, people frequently communicate through interactions and exchange knowledge over the social web in various formats. Social connections have been substantially improved by the emergence of social media platforms. Massive volumes of data have been generated by the expansion of social networks, and many people use them daily. Therefore, one of the current problems is to make it easier to find the appropriate friends for a particular user. Despite collaborative filtering’s huge success, accuracy and sparsity remain significant obstacles, particularly in the social networking sector, which has experienced astounding growth and has a large number of users. Social connections have been substantially improved by the emergence of social media platforms. In this work, a social and semantic-based collaborative filtering methodology is proposed for personalized recommendations in the context of social networking. A new hybrid collaborative filtering (HCoF) approach amalgamates the social and semantic suggestions. Two classification strategies are employed to enhance the performance of the recommendation to a high rate. Initially, the incremental K-means algorithm is applied to all users, and then the KNN algorithm for new users. The mean precision of 0.503 obtained by HCoF recommendation with semantic and social information results in an effective collaborative filtering enhancement strategy for friend recommendations in social networks. The evaluation’s findings showed that the proposed approach enhances recommendation accuracy while also resolving the sparsity and cold start issues.