Collaborative error-reflected models for cold-start recommender systems

Collaborative Filtering (CF), one of the most successful technologies among recommender systems, is a system assisting users to easily find useful information. One notable challenge in practical CF is the cold start problem, which can be divided into cold start items and cold start users. Traditional CF systems are typically unable to make good quality recommendations in the situation where users and items have few opinions. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a unique method of building models derived from explicit ratings and we apply the models to CF recommender systems. The proposed method first predicts actual ratings and subsequently identifies prediction errors for each user. From this error information, pre-computed models, collectively called the error-reflected model, are built. We then apply the models to new predictions. Experimental results show that our approach obtains significant improvement in dealing with cold start problems, compared to existing work. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.