Applying Cross-Level Association Rule Mining to Cold-Start Recommendations

We propose a novel hybrid recommendation algorithm for addressing the well-known cold-start problem in Collaborative Filtering (CF). Our algorithm makes use of Cross- Level Association RulEs (CLARE) to integrate content information about domain items into collaborative filters. We first introduce a preference model comprising both user- item and item-item relationships in recommender systems, and then describe how the CLARE algorithm generates recommendations for cold-start items based on the preference model. Experimental results validated that CLARE is capable of recommending cold-start items, and that it increases the number of recommendable items significantly by addressing the cold-start problem.