Dr. Julie Swenson (UCSB)

Title: A Bayesian Approach to Recommendation Systems.

Abstract: Recommendation systems have proliferated in the last decade. Currently, most recommendation systems utilize content based algorithms, collaborative filtering based algorithms, or a combination of both. The recent surge in popularity of social networks has led to the creation of trust based algorithms. While such recommendation systems have proven that they can be more successful than their content and collaborative filtering based counterparts, they are often are plagued with problems with cold start and data sparseness. We propose a Bayesian trust based algorithm that addresses both of these problems. Our results indicate that our method can be more successful than an existing Bayesian trust based algorithm.