An efficient cold start solution based on group interests for recommender systems

Number of people who uses internet and websites for various purposes is increasing at an astonishing rate. More and more people rely on online sites for purchasing rented movies, songs, apparels, books etc. The competition between numbers of sites forced the web site owners to provide personalized services to their customers. So the recommender systems came into existence. Recommender systems are active information filtering systems and that attempt to present to the user, information items in which the user is interested in. The websites implement recommender systems using collaborative filtering, content based or hybrid approaches. The recommender systems also suffer from issues like cold start, sparsity and over specialization. Cold start problem is that the recommenders cannot draw inferences for users or items for which it does not have sufficient information. This paper attempts to propose a solution to the cold start problem by combining association rules and clustering technique.

The cold start problem in recommender systems is a long-standing challenge, which requires recommending to new users (items) based on attributes without any historical interaction records. In these recommendation systems, warm users (items) have privileged collaborative signals of interaction records compared to cold start users (items), and these Collaborative Filtering (CF) signals are shown to have competing performance for recommendation. Many researchers proposed to learn the correlation between collaborative signal embedding space and the attribute embedding space to improve the cold start recommendation, in which user and item categorical attributes are available in many online platforms. However, the cold start recommendation is still limited by two embedding spaces modeling and simple assumptions of space transformation. As user-item interaction behaviors and user (item) attributes naturally form a heterogeneous graph structure, in this paper, we propose a privileged graph distillation model (PGD). The teacher model is composed of a heterogeneous graph structure for warm users and items with privileged CF links. The student model is composed of an entity-attribute graph without CF links. Specifically, the teacher model can learn better embeddings of each entity by injecting complex higher-order relationships from the constructed heterogeneous graph. The student model can learn the distilled output with privileged CF embeddings from the teacher embeddings. Our proposed model is generally applicable to different cold start scenarios with new user, new item, or new user-new item. Finally, extensive experimental results on the real-world datasets clearly show the effectiveness of our proposed model on different types of cold start problems, with average 6.6%, 5.6%, and 17.1% improvement over state-of-the-art baselines on three datasets, respectively.

Recommender systems predict and recommend items that could be from the user's interest. One of the main problems from recommender systems is the cold start problem, which happens when new users or items are registered into the system. In order to deal with this problem in the literature we can find many proposal. In many cases the solutions require users to provide explicit information which requires effort on their part. For that reason and given the great boom of social networks, we focus on systems that make use of external data sources. Then, in this paper will be presented an approach in which using social media data will classify the users and create some predictions by using classification trees. Therefore the users will not need to explicitly provide any data other than the source of their social media, helping in this way to alleviate the cold start problem, because the system always has information available to establish user profiles.

Reinforcement learning algorithms play an important role in modern day and have been applied to many domains. For example, personalized recommendations problem can be modelled as a contextual multi-armed bandit problem in reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a contextual bandit algorithm which is based on Contexts and the Chosen Number of Arm with Minimal Estimation, namely Con-CNAME in short. The continuous exploration and context used in our algorithm can address the cold start problem in recommender systems. Furthermore, the Con-CNAME algorithm can still make recommendations under the emergency circumstances where contexts are unavailable suddenly. In the experimental evaluation, the reference range of key parameters and the stability of Con-CNAME are discussed in detail. In addition, the performance of Con-CNAME is compared with some classic algorithms. Experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms several bandit algorithms.

Recommender Systems play a very important role in online services nowadays, with the huge repository of content being generated every day. While these systems are used on large scales, they still face a lot of problems. The item cold start is one of the most famous problems in recommender systems. While systems can develop an initial image of new user profiles through various methods, new items face a problem surfacing into user recommendations. This is because they have low to almost zero interactions, and most recommender systems use methods like collaborative filtering to share similar items to similar user profiles. This is an important problem to be dealt with. Otherwise, recommendation feeds get saturated with already popular content, which harms new creators on platforms that might be creating innovative content. We propose a hybrid recommender system: EASE'Em, that seeks to solve this problem by generating cold start items to users based on the item similarities and user profiles. Our model first uses an AutoEncoder recommendation system to fill a sparse user interaction matrix to develop a better understanding of user profiles. We then project item attributes and user profiles into a common low dimensional space and then use matrix factorization techniques to generate top-N recommendations for each user present in the set. We then compare our model generations with standard item-based recommender models on a subset of the Million Song Dataset and compare their results.

Recommender systems play an important role in most modern e-commerce applications. They have allowed users to become aware of the myriad choices available to them. The ease of information and the abundance of options have helped users make educated decisions. A recommender system studies a user's preferences and continues learning the user's changing interests, so as to suggest items that incline with the user's interests. In cases where a user is new to the application, or the user prefers not to discourse preferences, the recommender system is unable to gather the user's preference on any item. This is called the cold start problem; wherein the system can make valid recommendations only once the user starts informing the system about his/her choices. In this paper, we discuss the challenges faced by the cold start problem and how this problem may be alleviated using social media. We suggest an approach where we collect public information from users' social media accounts and analyze this information to understand their preferences. In particular, we gather the new user's information using their Twitter profile; i.e., the user's interest and preferences are extracted from his/her Twitter profile by analyzing his/her tweets. These interests will help the system understand what kind of movies the user will be most interested in. We compare these preferences with the metadata about the individual items. Using this approach, we develop a movie recommendation system wherein we produce top-N movie recommendations for a user. We used the MovieTweetings dataset to model the application. Two sets of results have been produced. In the first, smaller set of 770 users, 72.67% of users have received 100% accurate movie recommendations while nearly 80% of users got more than 75% accuracy. For the second, larger set of more than 3,500 users, 53 % of users have received 100% accurate recommendations while 72% of users got more than 75% accuracy. These encouraging results have demonstrated that the approach is effectively in alleviating cold start problems in recommendation systems, and may be applicable to many other e-commerce applications.

Recommendation systems (RSs) are tools for interacting with large and complex information spaces. They provide a personalized view of such spaces, prioritizing items likely to be of interest to the user. The main objective of RSs is to tool up users with desired items that meet their preferences. A major problem in RSs is called: “cold-start”; it is a potential problem called so in computer-based information systems which comprises a degree of automated data modeling. Particularly, it concerns the issue in which the system cannot draw any inferences nor have it yet gathered sufficient information about users or items. Since RSs performance is substantially limited by cold-start users and cold-start items problems; this research study takes the route for a major aim to attenuate users’ cold-start problem. Still in the process of researching, sundry studies have been conducted to tackle this issue by using clustering techniques to group users according to their social relations, their ratings or both. However, a clustering technique disregards a variety of users’ tastes. In this case, the researcher has adopted the overlapping technique as a tool to deal with the clustering technique’s defects. The advantage of the overlapping technique excels over others by allowing users to belong to multi-clusters at the same time according to their behavior in the social network and ratings feedback. On that account, a novel overlapping method is presented and applied. This latter is executed by using the partitioning around medoids (PAM) algorithm to implement the clustering, which is achieved by means of exploiting social relations and confidence values. After acquiring users’ clusters, the average distances are computed in each cluster. Thereafter, a content comparison is made regarding the distances between every user and the computed distances of the clusters. If the comparison result is less than or equal to the average distance of a cluster, a new user is added to this cluster. The singular value decomposition plus (SVD[Formula: see text]) method is then applied to every cluster to compute predictions values. The outcome is calculated by computing the average of mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) for every cluster. The model is tested by two real world datasets: Ciao and FilmTrust. Ultimately, findings have exhibited a great deal of insights on how the proposed model outperformed a number of the state-of-the-art studies in terms of prediction accuracy.

Factorization Machines (FMs) are effective in incorporating side information to overcome the cold-start and data sparsity problems in recommender systems. Traditional FMs adopt the inner product to model the second-order interactions between different attributes, which are represented via feature vectors. The problem is that the inner product violates the triangle inequality property of feature vectors. As a result, it cannot well capture fine-grained attribute interactions, resulting in sub-optimal performance. Recently, the euclidean distance is exploited in FMs to replace the inner product and has delivered better performance. However, previous FM methods including the ones equipped with the euclidean distance all focus on the attribute-level interaction modeling, ignoring the critical intrinsic feature correlations inside attributes. Thereby, they fail to model the complex and rich interactions exhibited in the real-world data. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a FM framework equipped with generalized metric learning techniques to better capture these feature correlations. In particular, based on this framework, we present a Mahalanobis distance and a deep neural network (DNN) methods, which can effectively model the linear and non-linear correlations between features, respectively. Besides, we design an efficient approach for simplifying the model functions. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin. Moreover, we collect a new large-scale dataset on second-hand trading to justify the effectiveness of our method over cold-start and data sparsity problems in recommender systems.

Cold start problem is one of the most challenging and long-standing problems in recommender systems, and cross-domain recommendation (CDR) methods are effective for tackling it. Most cold-start related CDR methods require training a mapping function between high-dimensional embedding space using overlapping user data. However, the overlapping data is scarce in many recommendation tasks, which makes it difficult to train the mapping function. In this paper, we propose a new approach for CDR, which aims to alleviate the training difficulty. The proposed method can be viewed as a special parameterization of the mapping function without hurting expressiveness, which makes use of non-overlapping user data and leads to effective optimization. Extensive experiments on two real-world CDR tasks are performed to evaluate the proposed method. In the case that there are few overlapping data, the proposed method outperforms the existed state-of-the-art method by 14% (relative improvement).

Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most popular approaches to build a recommendation system. In this paper, we propose a hybrid collaborative filtering model based on a Makovian random walk to address the data sparsity and cold start problems in recommendation systems. More precisely, we construct a directed graph whose nodes consist of items and users, together with item content, user profile and social network information. We incorporate user's ratings into edge settings in the graph model. The model provides personalized recommendations and predictions to individuals and groups. The proposed algorithms are evaluated on MovieLens and Epinions datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed methods perform well compared with other graph-based methods, especially in the cold start case.

Recommender systems are essential to overcome the information overload problem in professional learning environments. In this paper, we investigate interest-based recommendation in academic networks using social network analytics (SNA) methods. We implemented 21 different recommendation approaches based on traditional Collaborative Filtering (CF), Singular value Decomposition (SVD)-based RS, Trust-based CF, and SNA-based techniques for recommending new collaborators and research topics to the researchers. The evaluation results show that SNA-based recommendation outperforms traditional CF methods in terms of coverage and thus can provide an effective solution to the sparsity and cold start problems in recommender systems.

Recommender systems are becoming very popular in recent years, mainly in the e-commerce sites, although they are increasing in importance in other areas such as e-learning, tourism, news pages, etc. These systems are endowed with intelligent mechanisms to personalize recommendations about products or services. However, they present some serious drawbacks that impact in user satisfaction. First-rater and cold-start problems are two important drawbacks that take place respectively when new products or new users are introduced in the system. The lack of rating about these products or from these users prevents from making recommendations. Nowadays, traditional collaborative filtering methods have being replaced by web mining techniques in order to deal with scalability and performance problems, but first-rater and cold-start ones require a different strategy. In this work, we propose a methodology that combines data mining techniques with semantic data in order to overcome these two important shortcomings.

E-commerce customers demand quick and easy access to suitable products in large purchase spaces. To support and facilitate this purchasing process to users, recommender systems (RSs) help them to find out the information that best fits their preferences and needs in an overloaded search space. These systems require the elicitation of customers’ preferences. However, this elicitation process is not always precise either correct because of external factors such as human errors, uncertainty, human beings inherent inconsistency and so on. Such a problem in RSs is known as natural noise (NN) and can negatively bias recommendations, which leads to poor user’s experience. Different proposals have been presented to deal with natural noise in RSs. Several of them require additional interaction with customers. Others just remove noisy information. Recently, new NN approaches dealing with the ratings stored in the user/item rating matrix have raised to deal with NN in a better and simpler way. This contribution is devoted to provide a brief review of the latter approaches revising crisp and fuzzy approaches for dealing with NN in RSs. Eventually it points out as a future research the management of NN in other recommendation scenarios as group RSs.

Educational data can help us to personalise university information systems. In this paper, we show how educational data can be used to improve the performance of interaction-based recommender systems. Educational data is transformed to student profiles helping to prevent cold start problems when recommending projects to students with few user interactions. Our results show that our hybrid interaction based recommender boosted by educational profiles significantly outperforms bestseller recommendation, which is a mainstream recommendation method for cold start users.

Taxonomies are ubiquitous in many real-world recommendation scenarios where each item is classified into a category of a predefined hierarchical taxonomy and provide important auxiliary information for inferring user preferences. However, traditional collaborative filtering approaches have focused on user-item interactions (e.g., ratings) and neglected the impact of taxonomy information on recommendation. In this paper, we present a taxonomy-aware denoising autoencoder based model which incorporates taxonomy-aware side information into denoising autoencoder based recommendation models to enhance recommendation accuracy and alleviate data sparsity and cold start problems in recommendation systems. We propose two types of taxonomic side information, namely the topological representation of tree-structured taxonomy and the statistical properties of the taxonomy. By integrating taxonomic side information, our model can learn more effective user latent vectors which are not only determined by user ratings but also rely on the taxonomy information. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments on two real-world datasets which provide several outcomes: first, our proposed taxonomy-aware method outperforms the baseline method on RMSE metric. Next, information extracted from taxonomy can help alleviate data sparsity and cold start problems. Moreover, we conduct supplementary experiments to explore the reason why our proposed taxonomic side information improves recommendation performance.