Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK. Trust as a key to improving Recommendation Systems

Abstract. In this paper we propose a method that can be used to avoid the problem of sparsity in recommendation systems and thus to provide improved quality recommendations. The concept is based on the idea of using trust relationships to support the prediction of user preferences. We present the method as used in a centralized environment; we discuss its efficiency and compare its performance with other existing approaches. Finally we give a brief outline of the potential application of this approach to a decentralized environment