View article

The rapidly increasing availability of online social networks and the well-known effect of social influence have motivated research on social-network based recommenders. Social influence and selection together lead to the formation of communities of like-minded and well connected users. Exploiting the clustering of users and items is one of the most important approaches for model-based recommendation. Users may belong to multiple communities or groups, but only a few clustering algorithms allow clusters to overlap. One of these algorithms is the probabilistic EM clustering method, which assumes that data is generated from a mixture of Gaussian models. The mixed membership stochastic block model (MMB) transfers the idea of EM clustering from conventional, non-relational data to social network data. In this paper, we introduce a generalized stochastic blockmodel (GSBM) that models not only the social …