A microblog recommendation algorithm based on social tagging and a temporal interest evolution model

Personalized microblog recommendations face challenges of user cold-start problems and the interest evolution of topics. In this paper, we propose a collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm based on a temporal interest evolution model and social tag prediction. Three matrices are first prepared to model the relationship between users, tags, and microblogs. Then the scores of the tags for each microblog are optimized according to the interest evolution model of tags. In addition, to address the user cold-start problem, a social tag prediction algorithm based on community discovery and maximum tag voting is designed to extract candidate tags for users. Finally, the joint probability of a tag for each user is calculated by integrating the Bayes probability on the set of candidate tags, and the top n microblogs with the highest joint probabilities are recommended to the user. Experiments using datasets from the microblog of Sina Weibo showed that our algorithm achieved good recall and precision in terms of both overall and temporal performances. A questionnaire survey proved user satisfaction with recommendation results when the cold-start problem occurred.