A social recommendation method based on opinion leaders

With the rapid development of information technology, social media has been widely used, and Internet information has been exploded, and consumers may experience information overload. Recommender systems using the social recommendation method that integrates social relationship information can provide users with target information that meets their needs. However, most of the existing methods only rely on the user’s ordinary friends to make recommendations, neglecting another influential group, the opinion leaders. In this study, we propose a new social recommendation method based on opinion leaders. The proposed method assumes that the influence of the opinion leader on the user is much greater than that of the user’s ordinary friends. The experimental results on two real datasets show that the proposed method not only has a better recommendation effect than the state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms, but also has a good performance in the cases of cold-start users.