A Hybrid Approach to Resolve Data Sparsity and Cold Start Hassle in Recommender Systems

Author(s):  
B. Geluvaraj ◽  
Meenatchi Sundaram
Author(s):  
Fouzi Harrag ◽  
Abdulmalik Salman Al-Salman ◽  
Alaa Alquahtani

Recommender systems nowadays are playing an important role in the delivery of services and information to users. Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) is the process of determining the attitude of textual opinions, whether they are positive, negative or neutral. Data sparsity is representing a big issue for recommender systems because of the insufficiency of user rating or absence of data about users or items. This research proposed a hybrid approach combining sentiment analysis and recommender systems to tackle the problem of data sparsity problems by predicting the rating of products from users’ reviews using text mining and NLP techniques. This research focuses especially on Arabic reviews, where the model is evaluated using Opinion Corpus for Arabic (OCA) dataset. Our system was efficient, and it showed a good accuracy of nearly 85% in predicting the rating from reviews.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 607-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sajad Ahmadian ◽  
Mohsen Afsharchi ◽  
Majid Meghdadi

Trust-aware recommender systems are advanced approaches which have been developed based on social information to provide relevant suggestions to users. These systems can alleviate cold start and data sparsity problems in recommendation methods through trust relations. However, the lack of sufficient trust information can reduce the efficiency of these methods. Moreover, diversity and novelty are important measures for providing more attractive suggestions to users. In this article, a reputation-based approach is proposed to improve trust-aware recommender systems by enhancing rating profiles of the users who have insufficient ratings and trust information. In particular, we use a user reliability measure to determine the effectiveness of the rating profiles and trust networks of users in predicting unseen items. Then, a novel user reputation model is introduced based on the combination of the rating profiles and trust networks. The main idea of the proposed method is to enhance the rating profiles of the users who have low user reliability measure by adding a number of virtual ratings. To this end, the proposed user reputation model is used to predict the virtual ratings. In addition, the diversity, novelty and reliability measures of items are considered in the proposed rating profile enhancement mechanism. Therefore, the proposed method can improve the recommender systems about the cold start and data sparsity problems and also the diversity, novelty and reliability measures. Experimental results based on three real-world datasets show that the proposed method achieves higher performance than other recommendation methods.


Author(s):  
Liang Hu ◽  
Songlei Jian ◽  
Longbing Cao ◽  
Zhiping Gu ◽  
Qingkui Chen ◽  
...  

Classic recommender systems face challenges in addressing the data sparsity and cold-start problems with only modeling the user-item relation. An essential direction is to incorporate and understand the additional heterogeneous relations, e.g., user-user and item-item relations, since each user-item interaction is often influenced by other users and items, which form the user’s/item’s influential contexts. This induces important yet challenging issues, including modeling heterogeneous relations, interactions, and the strength of the influence from users/items in the influential contexts. To this end, we design Influential-Context Aggregation Units (ICAU) to aggregate the user-user/item-item relations within a given context as the influential context embeddings. Accordingly, we propose a Heterogeneous relations-Embedded Recommender System (HERS) based on ICAUs to model and interpret the underlying motivation of user-item interactions by considering user-user and item-item influences. The experiments on two real-world datasets show the highly improved recommendation quality made by HERS and its superiority in handling the cold-start problem. In addition, we demonstrate the interpretability of modeling influential contexts in explaining the recommendation results.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Wissam Al Jurdi ◽  
Jacques Bou Abdo ◽  
Jacques Demerjian ◽  
Abdallah Makhoul

Recommender systems have been upgraded, tested, and applied in many, often incomparable ways. In attempts to diligently understand user behavior in certain environments, those systems have been frequently utilized in domains like e-commerce, e-learning, and tourism. Their increasing need and popularity have allowed the existence of numerous research paths on major issues like data sparsity, cold start, malicious noise, and natural noise, which immensely limit their performance. It is typical that the quality of the data that fuel those systems should be extremely reliable. Inconsistent user information in datasets can alter the performance of recommenders, albeit running advanced personalizing algorithms. The consequences of this can be costly as such systems are employed in abundant online businesses. Successfully managing these inconsistencies results in more personalized user experiences. In this article, the previous works conducted on natural noise management in recommender datasets are thoroughly analyzed. We adequately explore the ways in which the proposed methods measure improved performances and touch on the different natural noise management techniques and the attributes of the solutions. Additionally, we test the evaluation methods employed to assess the approaches and discuss several key gaps and other improvements the field should realize in the future. Our work considers the likelihood of a modern research branch on natural noise management and recommender assessment.


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