Facing the cold start problem in recommender systems

A recommender system (RS) aims to provide personalized recommendations to users for specific items (e.g., music, books). Popular techniques involve content-based (CB) models and collaborative filtering (CF) approaches. In this paper, we deal with a very important problem in RSs: The cold start problem. This problem is related to recommendations for novel users or new items. In case of new users, the system does not have information about their preferences in order to make recommendations. We propose a model where widely known classification algorithms in combination with similarity techniques and prediction mechanisms provide the necessary means for retrieving recommendations. The proposed approach incorporates classification methods in a pure CF system while the use of demographic data help for the identification of other users with similar behavior. Our experiments show the performance of the proposed system through a large number of experiments. We adopt the widely known dataset provided by the GroupLens research group. We reveal the advantages of the proposed solution by providing satisfactory numerical results in different experimental scenarios. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.