Interest-based Recommendation in Academic Networks using Social Network Analysis

Recommender systems are essential to overcome the information overload problem in professional learning environments. In this paper, we investigate interest-based recommendation in academic networks using social network analytics (SNA) methods. We implemented 21 different recommendation approaches based on traditional Collaborative Filtering (CF), Singular value Decomposition (SVD)-based RS, Trust-based CF, and SNA-based techniques for recommending new collaborators and research topics to the researchers. The evaluation results show that SNA-based recommendation outperforms traditional CF methods in terms of coverage and thus can provide an effective solution to the sparsity and cold start problems in recommender systems.