Simultaneous co-clustering and learning to address the cold start problem in recommender systems

Recommender Systems (RSs) are powerful and popular tools for e-commerce. To build their recommendations, RSs make use of varied data sources, which capture the characteristics of items, users, and their transactions. Despite recent advances in RS, the cold start problem is still a relevant issue that deserves further attention, and arises due to the lack of prior information about new users and new items. To minimize system degradation, a hybrid approach is presented that combines collaborative filtering recommendations with demographic information. The approach is based on an existing algorithm, SCOAL (Simultaneous Co-Clustering and Learning), and provides a hybrid recommendation approach that can address the (pure) cold start problem, where no collaborative information (ratings) is available for new users. Better predictions are produced from this relaxation of assumptions to replace the lack of information for the new user. Experiments using real-world datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.