An empirical study of a cross-level association rule mining approach to cold-start recommendations

We propose a novel hybrid recommendation approach to address the well-known cold-start problem in Collaborative Filtering (CF). Our approach makes use of Cross-Level Association RuIEs (CLARE) to integrate content information about domain items into collaborative filters. We first introduce a preference model comprising both user-item and item-item relationships in recommender systems, and present a motivating example of our work based on the model. We then describe how CLARE generates cold-start recommendations. We empirically evaluated the effectiveness of CLARE, which shows superior performance to related work in addressing the cold-start problem. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.