Promoting cold-start items in recommender systems

PLoS One. 2014 Dec 5;9(12):e113457. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0113457. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

As one of the major challenges, cold-start problem plagues nearly all recommender systems. In particular, new items will be overlooked, impeding the development of new products online. Given limited resources, how to utilize the knowledge of recommender systems and design efficient marketing strategy for new items is extremely important. In this paper, we convert this ticklish issue into a clear mathematical problem based on a bipartite network representation. Under the most widely used algorithm in real e-commerce recommender systems, the so-called item-based collaborative filtering, we show that to simply push new items to active users is not a good strategy. Interestingly, experiments on real recommender systems indicate that to connect new items with some less active users will statistically yield better performance, namely, these new items will have more chance to appear in other users' recommendation lists. Further analysis suggests that the disassortative nature of recommender systems contributes to such observation. In a word, getting in-depth understanding on recommender systems could pave the way for the owners to popularize their cold-start products with low costs.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computers
  • Data Interpretation, Statistical
  • Health Promotion / economics*
  • Humans
  • Internet
  • Marketing*
  • Software*

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant nos. 11222543 and 61433014, and the Special Project of Sichuan Youth Science and Technology Innovation Research Team under grant no. 2013TD0006. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.