Solving Cold-Start Problem by Combining Personality Traits and Demographic Attributes in a User Based Recommender System

Zewengel Tilahun, Huang Dong Jun, Ammar Oad
2017 International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering  
Several approaches have been suggested for providing users with recommendations using their rating history, most of these approaches suffer from new user problem (cold-start) which is the initial lack of items rating. Most hybrid approaches use the combination of the rating based similarity measure with demographic filtering to solve the cold-start problem. In this paper we combined the rating based similarity calculation with the personality traits based similarity and demographic filtering.
more » ... integrated personality traits with the demographic characteristics because users with the same demographic attributes may have different personality or behavior so personality information is a necessary filtering condition for users to find better reference users to be recommendation guides. Even though users don't have a rating history the proposed enhanced similarity measure will find users with the same demographic attributes like age, gender, location...etc and the same personality traits. This helps to find the k-nearest neighbors for new users and solve cold-start problem which also can improve the performance of the recommender system.
doi:10.23956/ijarcsse/v7i4/01420 fatcat:23ucwmokwzcgte7oqf4mjhwnde