Improving Cold-Start Recommendations with Social-Media Trends and Reputations

Abstract

In recommender systems, the cold-start problem is a common challenge. When a new item has no ratings, it becomes difficult to relate it to other items or users. In this paper, we address the cold-start problem and propose to leverage on social-media trends and reputations to improve the recommendation of new items. The proposed framework models the long-term reputation of actors and directors, to better characterize new movies. In addition, movies popularity are deduced from social-media trends that are related to the corresponding new movie. A principled method is then applied to infer cold-start recommendations from these social-media signals. Experiments on a realistic time-frame, covering several movie-awards events between January 2014 and March 2014, showed significant improvements over ratings-only and metadata-only based recommendations.