Ellen Spertus - April 4, 2007
Title: Evaluating Similarity Measures: A Large-Scale Study in the Orkut Social
Network
Abstract: Online information services have grown too large for users to navigate
without the help of automated tools such as collaborative filtering, which
makes recommendations to users based on their collective past behavior.
While many similarity measures have been proposed and individually
evaluated, they have not been evaluated relative to each other in a large
real-world environment. We present an extensive empirical comparison of six
distinct measures of similarity for recommending online communities to
members of the Orkut social network. We determine the usefulness of the
different recommendations by actually measuring users' propensity to visit
and join recommended communities. We also examine how the ordering of
recommendations influenced user selection, as well as interesting social
issues that arise in recommending communities within a real social network.
Sami Rollins