MobHinter: Epidemic Collaborative Filtering and Self-Organization in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

We focus on collaborative filtering dealing with self-organizing communities, host mobility, wireless access, and ad-hoc communications. In such a domain, knowledge representation and users profiling can be hard; remote servers can be often unreachable due to client mobility; and feedback ratings collected during random connections to other users' ad-hoc devices can be useless, because of natural differences between human beings. Our approach is based on so called Affinity Networks, and on a novel system, called MobHinter, that epidemically spreads recommendations through spontaneous similarities between users. Main results of our study are two fold: firstly, we show how to reach comparable recommendation accuracies in the mobile domain as well as in a complete knowledge scenario; secondly, we propose epidemic collaborative strategies that can reduce rapidly and realistically the cold start problem.