Algorithm for finding potential matches

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 开发者_JAVA百科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.

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.

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

You might want to start off by looking at recommendation systems and nearest neighbor search.