  Recommender systems have shown great potential to address information
overload problem, namely to help users in finding interesting and relevant
objects within a huge information space. Some physical dynamics, including heat
conduction process and mass or energy diffusion on networks, have recently
found applications in personalized recommendation. Most of the previous studies
focus overwhelmingly on recommendation accuracy as the only important factor,
while overlook the significance of diversity and novelty which indeed provide
the vitality of the system. In this paper, we propose a recommendation
algorithm based on the preferential diffusion process on user-object bipartite
network. Numerical analyses on two benchmark datasets, MovieLens and Netflix,
indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Specifically, it can not only provide more accurate recommendations, but also
generate more diverse and novel recommendations by accurately recommending
unpopular objects.
