Personalized Recommendation for Online Social Networks Information: Personal Preferences and Location Based Community Trends

Online social networks are experiencing an explosive growth in recent years in both the number of users and the amount of information shared. The users join these social networks to connect with each other, share, find content and disseminate information by sending short text messages in near realtime. As a result of the growth of social networks, the users are often experiencing information overload since they interact with many other users and read ever increasing content volume. Thus, finding the "matching" users and content is one of the key challenges for social networks sites. Recommendation systems have been proposed to help users cope with information overload by predicting the items that a user may be interested in.

The users' preferences are shaped by personal interests. At the same time, users are affected by their surroundings, as determined by their geographically located communities. Accordingly, our approach takes into account both personal interests and local communities. We first propose a new dynamic recommendation system model that provides better customized content to the user. That is, the model provides the user with the most important tweets according to his individual interests. We then analyze how changes in the surrounding environment can affect the user's experience. Specifically, we study how changes in the geographical community preferences can affect the individual user's interests. These community preferences are generally reflected in the localized trending topics. Consequently, we present TrendFusion, an innovative model that analyzes the trends propagation, predicts the localized diffusion of trends in social networks and recommends the most interesting trends to the user. Our performance evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed recommendation system and shows that it improves the precision and recall of identifying important tweets by up to 36% and 80%, respectively. Results also show that TrendFusion accurately predicts places in which a trend will appear, with 98% recall and 80% precision.