We perform an empirical study of the preferential attachment phenomenon in temporal networks and show that on the Web, networks follow a nonlinear preferential attachment model in which the exponent depends on the type of network considered. The classical preferential attachment model for networks by Barab\'asi and Albert (1999) assumes a linear relationship between the number of neighbors of a node in a network and the probability of attachment. Although this assumption is widely made in Web Science and related fields, the underlying linearity is rarely measured. To fill this gap, this paper performs an empirical longitudinal (time-based) study on forty-seven diverse Web network datasets from seven network categories and including directed, undirected and bipartite networks. We show that contrary to the usual assumption, preferential attachment is nonlinear in the networks under consideration. Furthermore, we observe that the deviation from linearity is dependent on the type of network, giving sublinear attachment in certain types of networks, and superlinear attachment in others. Thus, we introduce the preferential attachment exponent $\beta$ as a novel numerical network measure that can be used to discriminate different types of networks. We propose explanations for the behavior of that network measure, based on the mechanisms that underly the growth of the network in question. [more]

Aggregated data in real world recommender applications often feature fat-tailed distributions of the number of times individual items have been rated or favored. We propose a model to simulate such data. The model is mainly based on social interactions and opinion formation taking place on a complex network with a given topology. A threshold mechanism is used to govern the decision making process that determines whether a user is or is not interested in an item. We demonstrate the validity of the model by fitting attendance distributions from different real data sets. The model is mathematically analyzed by investigating its master equation. Our approach provides an attempt to understand recommender system's data as a social process. The model can serve as a starting point to generate artificial data sets useful for testing and evaluating recommender systems. [more]

In this paper B-Rank, an efficient ranking algorithm for recommender systems, is proposed. B-Rank is based on a random walk model on hypergraphs. Depending on the setup, B-Rank outperforms other state of the art algorithms in terms of precision, recall (19% - 50%), and inter list diversity (20% - 60%). B-Rank captures well the difference between popular and niche objects. The proposed algorithm produces very promising results for sparse and dense voting matrices. Furthermore, a recommendation list update algorithm is introduced,to cope with new votes. This technique significantly reduces computational complexity. The implementation of the algorithm is simple, since B-Rank needs no parameter tuning. [more]