Trust-based context-aware mobile social network service recommendation

The service recommendation mechanism as a key enabling technology that provides users with more proactive and personalized service is one of the important research topics in mobile social network (MSN). Meanwhile, MSN is susceptible to various types of anonymous information or hacker actions. Trust can reduce the risk of interaction with unknown entities and prevent malicious attacks. In our paper, we present a trust-based service recommendation algorithm in MSN that considers users’ similarity and friends’ familiarity when computing trustworthy neighbors of target users. Firstly, we use the context information and the number of co-rated items to define users’ similarity. Then, motivated by the theory of six degrees of space, the friend familiarity is derived by graph-based method. Thus the proposed methods are further enhanced by considering users’ context in the recommendation phase. Finally, a set of simulations are conducted to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm. The results show that the friend familiarity and user similarity can effectively improve the recommendation performance, and the friend familiarity contributes more than the user similarity.