Applying Centrality Analysis to Solve the Cold-Start and Sparsity Problems in Collaborative Filtering
Yoon‐Ho Cho, Jounghae Bang · Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems · 2011
Collaborative Filtering (CF) suffers from two major problems：sparsity and cold-start recommendation. This paper focuses on the cold-start problem for new customers with no purchase records and the sparsity problem for the customers with very few purchase records. For the purpose, we propose a method for the new customer recommendation by using a combined measure based on three well-used centrality measures to identify the customers who are most likely to become neighbors of the new customer. To alleviate the sparsity problem, we also propose a hybrid approach that applies our method to customers with very few purchase records and CF to the other customers with sufficient purchases. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we have conducted several experiments using a data set from a department store in Korea. The experiment results show that the combination of two measures makes better recommendations than not only a single measure but also the best-seller-based method and that the performance is improved when applying the hybrid approach.