Addressing complete new item cold-start recommendation: A niche item-based collaborative filtering via interrelationship mining

Abstract

Recommender system (RS) can be used to provide personalized recommendations based on the different tastes of users. Item-based collaborative filtering (IBCF) has been successfully applied to modern RSs because of its excellent performance, but it is susceptible to the new item cold-start problem, especially when a new item has no rating records (complete new item cold-start). Motivated by this, we propose a niche approach which applies interrelationship mining into IBCF in this paper. The proposed approach utilizes interrelationship mining to extract new binary relations between each pair of item attributes, and constructs interrelated attributes to rich the available information on a new item. Further, similarity, computed using interrelated attributes, can reflect characteristics between new items and others more accurately. Some significant properties, as well as the usage of interrelated attributes, are provided in detail. Experimental results obtained suggest that the proposed approach can effectively solve the complete new item cold-start problem of IBCF and can be used to provide new item recommendations with satisfactory accuracy and diversity in modern RSs.