Addressing Cold Start Problem in Collaborative Filtering using Demographic Data with Entropy-based Methodology

Collaborative filtering based recommender systems (RS) are faced with cold start problem. This problem arises when the RS does not have enough information or opinion about a person or about a product and therefore cannot make recommendation for such person. In this paper, the demographic data of the user such as age, gender, and occupation are utilized as additional sources together with existing users’ rating to tackle the cold start problem by employing the entropy-based methodology to determine the degree of predictability. Experimental results on MovieLens dataset showed that the proposed method gives higher accuracy than other existing demographic based methods. Keywords— Cold Start, Collaborative Filtering, Entropy, Demographic Approach, Recommender Systems

Policy Brief For “Flexible Aging: New Ways To Measure The Diverse Experience Of Population Aging In Scotland

This ESRC-SDA funded project took a demographic approach using new metrics to studying population ageing. Key project findings mentioned in Policy Brief:• Until now, most notions of dependency are false.• As an average, the UK population is younger rather than older compared to 1950.• Old age dependency has declined rather than increased since 1980 as life expectancy at older ages and female labour force participation have increased.

Sustainable human wellbeing: What can demography contribute?

This note considers the role that demography as a discipline can play in addressing some of the key questions in the context of human wellbeing and sustainable development. Starting with the wellbeing function of sustainability science that tries to explain an indicator of human wellbeing as being determined by a set of capitals and explanatory factors, it gives an example of how the constituents of such a wellbeing indicator can be combined based on a demographic approach. It also highlights how a broadened view of demographic methodology that goes beyond the conventional focus on age and sex alone can help to make demography more relevant for studying the key challenges of humanity.

INTERPRETATION OF THE MIGRATION PHENOMENON IN MODERN MIGRATION STUDIES

Purpose: analysis of the most popular and most heuristic theories and concepts of migration that are in demand within the existing discourse of migrationology. Methods: Analysis, abstraction and categorization were chosen as the leading research methods. Results: based on the analysis of the theories and concepts of migration, the most popular popular theories of migration were considered, categorized, and the most heuristic approaches were identified. These include the migration-demographic approach, the demographic approach, the institutional-migration approach, the approach of interethnic and interethnic conflictology, the approach of migration regionalistics, the historical approach, and a number of others. It is proposed to use political and legal analysis as an approach to the study of migration. Scientific novelty: based on the analysis of approaches to the study of migration, the article proposes definitions of migration and migrant, and also shows the heuristicity of the political and legal approach to the study of migration. Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific activities when considering the issues of migrationology. In addition, they can be used in the development of regulatory legal documents in the field of migration, strategic planning documents, analysis and forecasting of migration processes both in general and in relation to individual countries.

Multigenerational Social Mobility: A Demographic Approach

Most social mobility studies take a two-generation perspective, in which intergenerational relationships are represented by the association between parents’ and offspring’s socioeconomic status. This approach, although widely adopted in the literature, has serious limitations when more than two generations of families are considered. In particular, it ignores the role of families’ demographic behaviors in moderating mobility outcomes and the joint role of mobility and demography in shaping long-run family and population processes. This article provides a demographic approach to the study of multigenerational social mobility, incorporating demographic mechanisms of births, deaths, and mating into statistical models of social mobility. Compared with previous mobility models for estimating the probability of offspring’s mobility conditional on parent’s social class, the proposed joint demography-mobility model treats the number of offspring in various social classes as the outcome of interest. This new approach shows the extent to which demographic processes may amplify or dampen the effects of family socioeconomic positions because of the direction and strength of the interaction between mobility and differentials in demographic behaviors. The author illustrates various demographic methods for studying multigenerational mobility with empirical examples using the IPUMS linked historical U.S. census representative samples (1850–1930), the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1968–2015), and simulation data that show other possible scenarios resulting from demography-mobility interactions.