Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning-Based Solution of Cold Start Problem Using Collaborative Filtering Approach

Abstract

In today’s digital era, the abundance of online services presents users with a daunting array of choices, spanning from streaming platforms to e-commerce websites, leading to decision fatigue. Recommendation algorithms play a pivotal role in aiding users in navigating this plethora of options, among which collaborative filtering (CF) stands out as a prevalent technique. However, CF encounters several challenges, including scalability issues, privacy implications, and the well-known cold start problem. This study endeavors to mitigate the cold start problem by harnessing the capabilities of natural language processing (NLP) applied to user-generated reviews. A unique methodology is introduced, integrating both supervised and unsupervised NLP approaches facilitated by sci-kit learn, utilizing benchmark datasets across diverse domains. This study offers scientific contributions through its novel approach, ensuring rigor, precision, scalability, and real-world relevance. It tackles the cold start problem in recommendation systems by combining natural language processing (NLP) with machine learning and collaborative filtering techniques, addressing data sparsity effectively. This study emphasizes reproducibility and accuracy while proposing an advanced solution that improves personalization in recommendation models. The proposed NLP-based strategy enhances the quality of user-generated content, consequently refining the accuracy of Collaborative Filtering-Based Recommender Systems (CFBRSs). The authors conducted experiments to test the performance of the proposed approach on benchmark datasets like MovieLens, Jester, Book-Crossing, Last.fm, Amazon Product Reviews, Yelp, Netflix Prize, Goodreads, IMDb (Internet movie Database) Data, CiteULike, Epinions, and Etsy to measure global accuracy, global loss, F-1 Score, and AUC (area under curve) values. Assessment through various techniques such as random forest, Naïve Bayes, and Logistic Regression on heterogeneous benchmark datasets indicates that random forest is the most effective method, achieving an accuracy rate exceeding 90%. Further, the proposed approach received a global accuracy above 95%, a global loss of 1.50%, an F-1 Score of 0.78, and an AUC value of 92%.Furthermore, the experiments conducted on distributed and global differential privacy (GDP) further optimize the system’s efficacy.