Hybridisation Techniques for Cold-Starting Context-Aware Recommender Systems

Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CARSs) suffer from the cold-start problem, i.e., the inability to provide accurate recommendations for new users, items or contextual situations. In this research, we aim at solving this problem by exploiting various hybridisation techniques, from simple heuristic-based solutions to complex adaptive solutions, in order to take advantage of the strengths of different CARS algorithms while avoiding their weaknesses in a given (coldstart) situation. Our initial research based on offline experiments using various contextually-tagged rating datasets has shown that basic CARS algorithms perform very differently in different recommendation scenarios, and that they can be effectively hybridised to achieve an overall optimal performance. Further research is now required to find the optimal method for hybridisation.