Recommender Systems for Online and Mobile Social Networks: A survey
It provides a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners working on enhancing recommender systems in social network contexts, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing work rather than introducing new methods.
This survey examines how recommender systems can leverage social context information from online and mobile social networks to improve personalization and performance, while addressing challenges like distributed environments and information overload.
Recommender Systems (RS) currently represent a fundamental tool in online services, especially with the advent of Online Social Networks (OSN). In this case, users generate huge amounts of contents and they can be quickly overloaded by useless information. At the same time, social media represent an important source of information to characterize contents and users' interests. RS can exploit this information to further personalize suggestions and improve the recommendation process. In this paper we present a survey of Recommender Systems designed and implemented for Online and Mobile Social Networks, highlighting how the use of social context information improves the recommendation task, and how standard algorithms must be enhanced and optimized to run in a fully distributed environment, as opportunistic networks. We describe advantages and drawbacks of these systems in terms of algorithms, target domains, evaluation metrics and performance evaluations. Eventually, we present some open research challenges in this area.