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Article
Publication date: 8 June 2010

Rosa M. Rodríguez, Macarena Espinilla, Pedro J. Sánchez and Luis Martínez‐López

Analyzing current recommender systems, it is observed that the cold start problem is still too far away to be satisfactorily solved. This paper aims to present a hybrid…

Abstract

Purpose

Analyzing current recommender systems, it is observed that the cold start problem is still too far away to be satisfactorily solved. This paper aims to present a hybrid recommender system which uses a knowledge‐based recommendation model to provide good cold start recommendations.

Design/methodology/approach

Hybridizing a collaborative system and a knowledge‐based system, which uses incomplete preference relations means that the cold start problem is solved. The management of customers' preferences, necessities and perceptions implies uncertainty. To manage such an uncertainty, this information has been modeled by means of the fuzzy linguistic approach.

Findings

The use of linguistic information provides flexibility, usability and facilitates the management of uncertainty in the computation of recommendations, and the use of incomplete preference relations in knowledge‐based recommender systems improves the performance in those situations when collaborative models do not work properly.

Research limitations/implications

Collaborative recommender systems have been successfully applied in many situations, but when the information is scarce such systems do not provide good recommendations.

Practical implications

A linguistic hybrid recommendation model to solve the cold start problem and provide good recommendations in any situation is presented and then applied to a recommender system for restaurants.

Originality/value

Current recommender systems have limitations in providing successful recommendations mainly related to information scarcity, such as the cold start. The use of incomplete preference relations can improve these limitations, providing successful results in such situations.

Details

Internet Research, vol. 20 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1066-2243

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 August 1946

Flight‐Lieutenant C.G. Pickering

THIS article deals with the cold starting and associated problems of reciprocating engines as distinct from jet engines. The associated problems are those which limit the…

Abstract

THIS article deals with the cold starting and associated problems of reciprocating engines as distinct from jet engines. The associated problems are those which limit the satisfactory operation of the engine after the initial start, and are included because they form part of the functioning of the unit. The general problem of cold starting may be split up under the following headings and each one will be dealt with separately:

Details

Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, vol. 18 no. 8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0002-2667

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 5 August 2021

Rui Qiu and Wen Ji

Many recommender systems are generally unable to provide accurate recommendations to users with limited interaction history, which is known as the cold-start problem. This issue…

Abstract

Purpose

Many recommender systems are generally unable to provide accurate recommendations to users with limited interaction history, which is known as the cold-start problem. This issue can be resolved by trivial approaches that select random items or the most popular one to recommend to the new users. However, these methods perform poorly in many cases. This paper aims to explore the problem that how to make accurate recommendations for the new users in cold-start scenarios.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, the authors propose embedded-bandit method, inspired by Word2Vec technique and contextual bandit algorithm. The authors describe user contextual information with item embedding features constructed by Word2Vec. In addition, based on the intelligence measurement model in Crowd Science, the authors propose a new evaluation method to measure the utility of recommendations.

Findings

The authors introduce Word2Vec technique for constructing user contextual features, which improved the accuracy of recommendations compared to traditional multi-armed bandit problem. Apart from this, using this study’s intelligence measurement model, the utility also outperforms.

Practical implications

Improving the accuracy of recommendations during the cold-start phase can greatly raise user stickiness and increase user favorability, which in turn contributes to the commercialization of the app.

Originality/value

The algorithm proposed in this paper reflects that user contextual features can be represented by clicked items embedding vector.

Details

International Journal of Crowd Science, vol. 5 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2398-7294

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 10 November 2020

Samira Khodabandehlou, S. Alireza Hashemi Golpayegani and Mahmoud Zivari Rahman

Improving the performance of recommender systems (RSs) has always been a major challenge in the area of e-commerce because the systems face issues such as cold start, sparsity…

Abstract

Purpose

Improving the performance of recommender systems (RSs) has always been a major challenge in the area of e-commerce because the systems face issues such as cold start, sparsity, scalability and interest drift that affect their performance. Despite the efforts made to solve these problems, there is still no RS that can solve or reduce all the problems simultaneously. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide an effective and comprehensive RS to solve or reduce all of the above issues, which uses a combination of basic customer information as well as big data techniques.

Design/methodology/approach

The most important steps in the proposed RS are: (1) collecting demographic and behavioral data of customers from an e-clothing store; (2) assessing customer personality traits; (3) creating a new user-item matrix based on customer/user interest; (4) calculating the similarity between customers with efficient k-nearest neighbor (EKNN) algorithm based on locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) approach and (5) defining a new similarity function based on a combination of personality traits, demographic characteristics and time-based purchasing behavior that are the key incentives for customers' purchases.

Findings

The proposed method was compared with different baselines (matrix factorization and ensemble). The results showed that the proposed method in terms of all evaluation measures led to a significant improvement in traditional collaborative filtering (CF) performance, and with a significant difference (more than 40%), performed better than all baselines. According to the results, we find that our proposed method, which uses a combination of personality information and demographics, as well as tracking the recent interests and needs of the customer with the LSH approach, helps to improve the effectiveness of the recommendations more than the baselines. This is due to the fact that this method, which uses the above information in conjunction with the LSH technique, is more effective and more accurate in solving problems of cold start, scalability, sparsity and interest drift.

Research limitations/implications

The research data were limited to only one e-clothing store.

Practical implications

In order to achieve an accurate and real-time RS in e-commerce, it is essential to use a combination of customer information with efficient techniques. In this regard, according to the results of the research, the use of personality traits and demographic characteristics lead to a more accurate knowledge of customers' interests and thus better identification of similar customers. Therefore, this information should be considered as a solution to reduce the problems of cold start and sparsity. Also, a better judgment can be made about customers' interests by considering their recent purchases; therefore, in order to solve the problems of interest drifts, different weights should be assigned to purchases and launch time of products/items at different times (the more recent, the more weight). Finally, the LSH technique is used to increase the RS scalability in e-commerce. In total, a combination of personality traits, demographics and customer purchasing behavior over time with the LSH technique should be used to achieve an ideal RS. Using the RS proposed in this research, it is possible to create a comfortable and enjoyable shopping experience for customers by providing real-time recommendations that match customers' preferences and can result in an increase in the profitability of e-shops.

Originality/value

In this study, by considering a combination of personality traits, demographic characteristics and time-based purchasing behavior of customers along with the LSH technique, we were able for the first time to simultaneously solve the basic problems of CF, namely cold start, scalability, sparsity and interest drift, which led to a decrease in significant errors of recommendations and an increase in the accuracy of CF. The average errors of the recommendations provided to users based on the proposed model is only about 13%, and the accuracy and compliance of these recommendations with the interests of customers is about 92%. In addition, a 40% difference between the accuracy of the proposed method and the traditional CF method has been observed. This level of accuracy in RSs is very significant and special, which is certainly welcomed by e-business owners. This is also a new scientific finding that is very useful for programmers, users and researchers. In general, the main contributions of this research are: 1) proposing an accurate RS using personality traits, demographic characteristics and time-based purchasing behavior; 2) proposing an effective and comprehensive RS for a “clothing” online store; 3) improving the RS performance by solving the cold start issue using personality traits and demographic characteristics; 4) improving the scalability issue in RS through efficient k-nearest neighbors; 5) Mitigating the sparsity issue by using personality traits and demographic characteristics and also by densifying the user-item matrix and 6) improving the RS accuracy by solving the interest drift issue through developing a time-based user-item matrix.

Article
Publication date: 20 June 2016

Masoud Mansoury and Mehdi Shajari

This paper aims to improve the recommendations performance for cold-start users and controversial items. Collaborative filtering (CF) generates recommendations on the basis of…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to improve the recommendations performance for cold-start users and controversial items. Collaborative filtering (CF) generates recommendations on the basis of similarity between users. It uses the opinions of similar users to generate the recommendation for an active user. As a similarity model or a neighbor selection function is the key element for effectiveness of CF, many variations of CF are proposed. However, these methods are not very effective, especially for users who provide few ratings (i.e. cold-start users).

Design/methodology/approach

A new user similarity model is proposed that focuses on improving recommendations performance for cold-start users and controversial items. To show the validity of the authors’ similarity model, they conducted some experiments and showed the effectiveness of this model in calculating similarity values between users even when only few ratings are available. In addition, the authors applied their user similarity model to a recommender system and analyzed its results.

Findings

Experiments on two real-world data sets are implemented and compared with some other CF techniques. The results show that the authors’ approach outperforms previous CF techniques in coverage metric while preserves accuracy for cold-start users and controversial items.

Originality/value

In the proposed approach, the conditions in which CF is unable to generate accurate recommendations are addressed. These conditions affect CF performance adversely, especially in the cold-start users’ condition. The authors show that their similarity model overcomes CF weaknesses effectively and improve its performance even in the cold users’ condition.

Details

International Journal of Web Information Systems, vol. 12 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1744-0084

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 5 September 2017

Muhammad Ali Masood, Rabeeh Ayaz Abbasi, Onaiza Maqbool, Mubashar Mushtaq, Naif R. Aljohani, Ali Daud, Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam and Jalal S. Alowibdi

Tags are used to annotate resources on social media platforms. Most tag recommendation methods use popular tags, but in the case of new resources that are as yet untagged (the cold

Abstract

Purpose

Tags are used to annotate resources on social media platforms. Most tag recommendation methods use popular tags, but in the case of new resources that are as yet untagged (the cold start problem), popularity-based tag recommendation methods fail to work. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel model for tag recommendation called multi-feature space latent Dirichlet allocation (MFS-LDA) for cold start problem.

Design/methodology/approach

MFS-LDA is a novel latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based model which exploits multiple feature spaces (title, contents, and tags) for recommending tags. Exploiting multiple feature spaces allows MFS-LDA to recommend tags even if data from a feature space is missing (the cold start problem).

Findings

Evaluation of a publicly available data set consisting of around 20,000 Wikipedia articles that are tagged on a social bookmarking website shows a significant improvement over existing LDA-based tag recommendation methods.

Originality/value

The originality of MFS-LDA lies in segregation of features for removing bias toward dominant features and in synchronization of multiple feature space for tag recommendation.

Details

Program, vol. 51 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0033-0337

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 20 July 2023

Mu Shengdong, Liu Yunjie and Gu Jijian

By introducing Stacking algorithm to solve the underfitting problem caused by insufficient data in traditional machine learning, this paper provides a new solution to the cold

Abstract

Purpose

By introducing Stacking algorithm to solve the underfitting problem caused by insufficient data in traditional machine learning, this paper provides a new solution to the cold start problem of entrepreneurial borrowing risk control.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors introduce semi-supervised learning and integrated learning into the field of migration learning, and innovatively propose the Stacking model migration learning, which can independently train models on entrepreneurial borrowing credit data, and then use the migration strategy itself as the learning object, and use the Stacking algorithm to combine the prediction results of the source domain model and the target domain model.

Findings

The effectiveness of the two migration learning models is evaluated with real data from an entrepreneurial borrowing. The algorithmic performance of the Stacking-based model migration learning is further improved compared to the benchmark model without migration learning techniques, with the model area under curve value rising to 0.8. Comparing the two migration learning models reveals that the model-based migration learning approach performs better. The reason for this is that the sample-based migration learning approach only eliminates the noisy samples that are relatively less similar to the entrepreneurial borrowing data. However, the calculation of similarity and the weighing of similarity are subjective, and there is no unified judgment standard and operation method, so there is no guarantee that the retained traditional credit samples have the same sample distribution and feature structure as the entrepreneurial borrowing data.

Practical implications

From a practical standpoint, on the one hand, it provides a new solution to the cold start problem of entrepreneurial borrowing risk control. The small number of labeled high-quality samples cannot support the learning and deployment of big data risk control models, which is the cold start problem of the entrepreneurial borrowing risk control system. By extending the training sample set with auxiliary domain data through suitable migration learning methods, the prediction performance of the model can be improved to a certain extent and more generalized laws can be learned.

Originality/value

This paper introduces the thought method of migration learning to the entrepreneurial borrowing scenario, provides a new solution to the cold start problem of the entrepreneurial borrowing risk control system and verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the migration learning method applied in the risk control field through empirical data.

Details

Management Decision, vol. 62 no. 8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0025-1747

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 16 April 2020

Qiaoling Zhou

English original movies played an important role in English learning and communication. In order to find the required movies for us from a large number of English original movies…

Abstract

Purpose

English original movies played an important role in English learning and communication. In order to find the required movies for us from a large number of English original movies and reviews, this paper proposed an improved deep reinforcement learning algorithm for the recommendation of movies. In fact, although the conventional movies recommendation algorithms have solved the problem of information overload, they still have their limitations in the case of cold start-up and sparse data.

Design/methodology/approach

To solve the aforementioned problems of conventional movies recommendation algorithms, this paper proposed a recommendation algorithm based on the theory of deep reinforcement learning, which uses the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm to solve the cold starting and sparse data problems and uses Item2vec to transform discrete action space into a continuous one. Meanwhile, a reward function combining with cosine distance and Euclidean distance is proposed to ensure that the neural network does not converge to local optimum prematurely.

Findings

In order to verify the feasibility and validity of the proposed algorithm, the state of the art and the proposed algorithm are compared in indexes of RMSE, recall rate and accuracy based on the MovieLens English original movie data set for the experiments. Experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm is superior to the conventional algorithm in various indicators.

Originality/value

Applying the proposed algorithm to recommend English original movies, DDPG policy produces better recommendation results and alleviates the impact of cold start and sparse data.

Details

International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, vol. 13 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1756-378X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 27 April 2022

Gwang Han Lee, Sungmin Kim and Chang Kyu Park

The purpose of this study is to solve the cold start problem caused by the lack of evaluation information about the products.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to solve the cold start problem caused by the lack of evaluation information about the products.

Design/methodology/approach

A recommendation system has been developed by using the image data of the clothing products, assuming that the user considers the visual characteristics importantly when purchasing fashion products. In order to evaluate the performance of the model developed in this study, it was compared with Random, Itempop, Matrix Factorization and Generalized Matrix Factorization models.

Findings

The newly developed model was able to cope with the cold start problem better than other models.

Social implications

A hybrid recommendation system has been developed that combines the existing recommendation system with deep learning to effectively recommend fashion products considering the user's taste.

Originality/value

This is the first research to improve the performance of fashion recommendation system using the deep learning model trained by the images of fashion products.

Details

International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, vol. 34 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0955-6222

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 9 January 2020

Duen-Ren Liu, Yun-Cheng Chou and Ciao-Ting Jian

Online news websites provide diverse article topics, such as fashion news, entertainment and movie information, to attract more users and create more benefits. Recommending movie…

Abstract

Purpose

Online news websites provide diverse article topics, such as fashion news, entertainment and movie information, to attract more users and create more benefits. Recommending movie information to users reading news online can enhance the impression of diverse information and may consequently improve benefits. Accordingly, providing online movie recommendations can improve users’ satisfactions with the website, and thus is an important trend for online news websites. This study aims to propose a novel online recommendation method for recommending movie information to users when they are browsing news articles.

Design/methodology/approach

Association rule mining is applied to users’ news and movie browsing to find latent associations between news and movies. A novel online recommendation approach is proposed based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), enhanced collaborative topic modeling (ECTM) and the diversity of recommendations. The performance of proposed approach is evaluated via an online evaluation on a real news website.

Findings

The online evaluation results show that the click-through rate can be improved by the proposed hybrid method integrating recommendation diversity, LDA, ECTM and users’ online interests, which are adapted to the current browsing news. The experiment results also show that considering recommendation diversity can achieve better performance.

Originality/value

Existing studies had not investigated the problem of recommending movie information to users while they are reading news online. To address this problem, a novel hybrid recommendation method is proposed for dealing with cross-type recommendation tasks and the cold-start issue. Moreover, the proposed method is implemented and evaluated online in a real world news website, while such online evaluation is rarely conducted in related research. This work contributes to deriving user’s online preferences for cross-type recommendations by integrating recommendation diversity, LDA, ECTM and adaptive online interests. The research findings also contribute to increasing the commercial value of the online news websites.

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