Fig. 4

Median distance distributions. The median distance of a node measures the median shortest path from that node to any other node in the largest strongly connected component and allows us to gain insights into the lengths of common paths in a recommendation network. This figure shows the median path lengths for MovieLens (the other data sets lead to very similar results). As the number of recommendations increases from 5 to 20, path lengths substantially decrease. This shows that the number of recommendations exerts a strong influence on the resulting path lengths