IBCFaiCDR: Auxiliary data-driven item-based collaborative filtering in cross-domain RSs to address user cold start problem

Abstract

The adoption of Recommender Systems (RSs) in various services is imperative in the present era. One of the inherent challenge faced by RSs is the user cold start problem (UCS) and it occurs when there is a lack of enough data available for a new user, which restricts the capacity to provide accurate recommendations. Researchers have conducted investigations into the utilization of auxiliary data like social network data, review text, demographic information etc., to augment the RSs ability to learn and understand the user's preferences, with the aim of solving this issue. The provided information is inadequate due to the restricted level of user engagement within the specified domain. The researchers utilize a Cross-Domain RS (CDR) that incorporates information from multiple domains to provide personalized suggestions to users. Item Based Collaborative Filtering (IBCF), which utilizes item-item similarity, is commonly used when dealing with sparse data. The suggested collaborative filtering technique employs IBCF which uses the item similarity obtained with item features. These features are generated by the proposed approach IBCFaiCDR's model, trained on source domain data such as product images and reviews. The efficacy of the proposed approach is assessed using a large dataset from Amazon, consisting of user interactions across many categories. The results on target domain, evaluated using MAE and RMSE, indicate that the inclusion of auxiliary information (image + text) enhances the RS performance for new users.