Genre Familiarity Correlation-Based Recommender Algorithm for New User Cold Start Problem

Abstract

The advancement of web services paved the way to the accumulation of a tremendous amount of information into the world wide web. The huge pile of information makes it hard for the user to get the required information at the right time. Therefore, to get the right item, recommender systems are emphasized. Recommender algorithms generally act on the user information to render recommendations. In this scenario, when a new user enters the system, it fails in rendering recommendation due to unavailability of user information, resulting in a new user problem. So, in this paper, a movie recommender algorithm is constructed to address the prevailing new user cold start problem by utilizing only movie genres. Unlike other techniques, in the proposed work, familiarity of each movie genre is considered to compute the genre significance value. Based on genre significance value, genre similarity is correlated to render recommendations to a new user. The evaluation of the proposed recommender algorithm on real-world datasets shows that the algorithm performs better than the other similar approaches.