Algorithm for finding potential matches

Question

I need to find and algorithm to find the best matches in a social network. The system is a college student social network, and basically the main idea is to find a study partner for a class. The idea it's to suggest to the user what are the potential best partners based on different criteria, such as common class, GPA, rating, common schedule, etc. I wonder what would be the best algorithm to use.

Answer 1

Such problem is called collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering systems can produce personal recommendations by computing the similarity between your preference and the one of other people.

There are a lot of information about such teqniques. You might start with good presentation.

Answer 2

Maybe some sort of clustering algorithm could help. Those whose vectors (Common class, GPA etc...) are similar would be clustered together.