Privacy-aware Cold-Start Recommendation based on Collaborative Filtering and Enhanced Trust

The ever-increasing popularity of the recommender system provides a convenient way for users to find their interesting items among plenty of candidate services. However, on account of the enhancement of user privacy protection consciousness in recent years, users tend to conceal their evaluation information from the public. Thus, a large number of users with little explicit rating information are generated (i.e., cold-start users), which makes it challenging to implement high-quality recommendations. It has become a serious barrier to further and broader applications of the recommender system. In response to this issue, we take social network information into account and first propose TeCF (Trust-enhanced Collaborative Filtering). Our proposal integrates user-based, item-based, and trust-based collaborative filtering methods harmoniously and achieves a good trade-off between privacy preservation and service recommendation accuracy. A case study is conducted to validate the feasibility and comprehensiveness of our research.