A genetic algorithm approach to recommender system cold start problem

Abstract

Recommender systems (RS) are ubiquitous and used in many systems to augment user experience to improve usability and they achieve this by helping users discover new products to consume. They, however, suffer from cold-start problem which occurs when there is not enough information to generate recommendations to a user. Cold-start occurs when a new user enters the system that we don’t know about. We have proposed a novel algorithm to make recommendations to new users by recommending outside of their preferences. We also propose a genetic algorithm based solution to make recommendations when we lack information about user and a transitive algorithm to form neighbourhood. Altogether, we developed three algorithms and tested them using they MovieLens dataset. We have found that all of our algorithms performed well during our testing using the offline-evaluation method.