How “What You Seek is Already Seeking You” in Large Social Networks?

In the recent years, recommender systems have been used extensively in various social networks. Any social networks like blogs, forums, social network websites, social bookmarking websites, video portals, chat portals use these recommendation systems to improve the networking between people. Everyone these days on the social networking is trying to seek something that is important to them, as is the person’s enthusiasm to find the required information, so is the networks enthusiasm to provide people on the internet with the information they need to keep them interested in the various aspects of the network. Recommendation systems are extensively used in all these social networks basically to help the users view or know about contents and products that are of their interests. This paper main aim is to give a comparative and comprehensive study on research articles published from 2016 to 2019 by implementing a methodological decision analysis in six aspects, including data mining techniques, recommendation approaches and types, datasets used in specific research domains and the evaluation of the recommender systems utilized. The aim of this paper was accomplished by analyzing the extracted articles on various recommendation approaches used. Social media domains where recommender system are being used have also been identified. The various datasets that are available publicly are also reported. The datamining techniques, performance measures and recommendation types are reported as per various technical aspects. Further, open research directions are also presented for researchers to work in Large Social Networks.