Cold-start management with cross-domain collaborative filtering and tags

Recommender systems suffer from the new user problem, i.e., the difficulty to make accurate predictions for users that have rated only few items. Moreover, they usually compute recommendations for items just in one domain, such as movies, music, or books. In this paper we deal with such a cold-start situation exploiting cross-domain recommendation techniques, i.e., we suggest items to a user in one target domain by using ratings of other users in a, completely disjoint, auxiliary domain. We present three rating prediction models that make use of information about how users tag items in an auxiliary domain, and how these tags correlate with the ratings to improve the rating prediction task in a different target domain. We show that the proposed techniques can effectively deal with the considered cold-start situation, given that the tags used in the two domains overlap. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.