Addressing data sparsity and cold-start challenges in recommender systems using advanced deep learning and self-supervised learning techniques

Abstract

ABSTRACT The efficacy of e-commerce conversion rates relies on precise and personalized product recommendations within recommendation systems (RS). While collaborative filtering-based RS has demonstrated success, challenges such as sparsity and cold-start issues in the user-item matrix can impede optimal functionality. To address these challenges, there is a need to integrate additional information sources, encompassing item/user profiles and textual reviews. This study introduces an innovative RS architecture that seamlessly combines self-supervised learning (SSL) and collaborative filtering techniques with BERT-DNN to surmount these obstacles. The distinctiveness of our approach lies in integrating self-supervised learning with collaborative filtering and contextualized data obtained from BERT-DNN, providing a profound understanding of item profiles to enhance comprehension of user preferences and item characteristics. This refined understanding, operational in conjunction with collaborative filtering models like ItemKNN and UserKNN, empowers the system to generate highly personalized recommendations. The proposed method entails several pivotal steps: developing the BERT language model for textual embeddings in item profiles, conducting dimensionality reduction, constructing a Deep Neural Network, implementing self-supervised learning with both UserKNN and ItemKNN CF methods, and employing an ensemble learning technique. Empirical results substantiate the efficacy of our approach, with a specific focus on the innovative fusion of BERT-DNN with self-supervised learning and KNN CF methodologies, showcasing substantial improvements across diverse performance metrics. This underscores the practical importance of leveraging contextualized BERT-DNN data, strengthening the recommendation mechanism, and ultimately enhancing the overall performance of the RS.