Dealing with the new user cold-start problem in recommender systems: A comparative review

The Recommender System (RS) is an efficient tool for decision makers that assists in the selection of appropriate items according to their preferences and interests. This system has been applied to various domains to personalize applications by recommending items such as books, movies, songs, restaurants, news articles and jokes, among others. An important issue for the RS that has greatly captured the attention of researchers is the new user cold-start problem, which occurs when there is a new user that has been registered to the system and no prior rating of this user is found in the rating table. In this paper, we first present a classification that divides the relevant studies addressing the new user cold-start problem into three major groups and summarize their advantages and disadvantages in a tabular format Next, some typical algorithms of these groups, such as MIPFGWC-CS, NHSM, FARAMS and HU-FCF, are described. Finally, these algorithms are implemented and validated on some benchmark RS datasets under various settings of the new user cold start. The experimental results indicate that NHSM achieves better accuracy and computational time than the relevant methods. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.