Power of the Few: Analyzing the Impact of Influential Users in Collaborative Recommender Systems

The Like other social systems, in collaborative filtering a small number main tenet of this approach is to recommend items of interest to a of "influential" users may have a large impact on the recommendations user based on the preferences of other similar users in the system. of other users, thus affecting the overall behavior of the Because of the social nature of these systems, a small group of system. Identifying influential users and studying their impact on "influential" users can have a significant impact on the behavior other users is an important problem because it provides insight of the system towards other users. This type of influence may, in into how small groups can inadvertently or intentionally affect the some cases, result in undesirable effects such as bias toward certain behavior of the system as a whole. Modeling these influences can items, lack of diversity or imbalance in recommendations, and even also shed light on patterns and relationships that would otherwise potential security concerns such as making it easier to deliberately be difficult to discern, hopefully leading to more transparency in manipulate the system outcomes.