Exploring acquaintances of social network site users for effective social event recommendations

•An effective social event recommendation method is developed.•The content of the attended events are useful for social event recommendations.•The experiments reveal interesting behavior patterns of social network site users.

In this paper, we propose a social event recommendation method that exploits a user's social interaction relations and collaborative friendships to recommend events of interest. A challenge of the social event recommendation is that social events, such as online seminars and meet-ups, are one-and-only items. They are only valid for a short period of time and the ratings made by participants are not available until the events are over. Hence, recommending useful events to users is challenging. Instead of using ratings, we analyzed the behavior patterns of social network users to measure their social and collaborative friendships. The friendships were aggregated to identify the acquaintances of a target user and social events relevant to the preferences of the acquaintances and the user were recommended.