Improving Top-N Recommendation for Cold-Start Users via Cross-Domain Information

Making accurate recommendations for cold-start users is a challenging yet important problem in recommendation systems. Including more information from other domains is a natural solution to improve the recommendations. However, most previous work in cross-domain recommendations has focused on improving prediction accuracy with several severe limitations. In this article, we extend our previous work on clustering-based matrix factorization in single domains into cross domains. In addition, we utilize recent results on unobserved ratings. Our new method can more effectively utilize data from auxiliary domains to achieve better recommendations, especially for cold-start users. For example, our method improves the recall to 21% on average for cold-start users, whereas previous methods result in only 15% recall in the cross-domain Amazon dataset. We also observe almost the same improvements in the Epinions dataset. Considering that it is often difficult to make even a small improvement in recommendations, for cold-start users in particular, our result is quite significant.