A Multi-Armed Bandit Model Selection for Cold-Start User Recommendation
Crícia Z. Felício, Klérisson V. R. Paixão, Célia A. Zorzo Barcelos, Philippe Preux · 2017
How can we effectively recommend items to a user about whom we have no information? This is the problem we focus on in this paper, known as the cold-start problem. In most existing works, the cold-start problem is handled through the use of many kinds of information available about the user. However, what happens if we do not have any information? Recommender systems usually keep a substantial amount of prediction models that are available for analysis. Moreover, recommendations to new users yield uncertain returns. Assuming that a number of alternative prediction models is available to select items to recommend to a cold user, this paper introduces a multi-armed bandit based model selection, named PdMS. In comparison with three baselines, PdMS improves the performance as measured by the nDCG. These improvements are demonstrated on real, public datasets.