Tourism Destination Recommender System for the Cold Start Problem
Xiaoyao Zheng, Yonglong Luo, Zhiyun Xu, Qingying Yu, Lin Lu · KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems · 2016
With the advent and popularity of e-commerce, an increasing number of consumers prefer to order tourism products online. A recommender system can help these users contend with information overload; however, such a system is affected by the cold start problem. Online tourism destination searching is a more difficult task than others on account of its more restrictive factors. In this paper, we therefore propose a tourism destination recommender system that employs opinion-mining technology to refine user preferences and item opinion reputations. These elements are then fused into a hybrid collaborative filtering method by combining user- and item-based collaborative filtering approaches. Meanwhile, we embed an artificial interactive module in our recommender system to alleviate the cold start problem. Compared with several well-known cold start recommendation approaches, our method provides improved recommendation accuracy and quality. A series of experimental evaluations using a publicly available dataset demonstrate that the proposed recommender system outperforms existing recommender systems in addressing the cold start problem.