Supervised Learning-Based Collaborative Filtering Using Market Basket Data for the Cold-Start Problem

The market basket data in the form of a binary user-item matrix or a binary item-user matrix can be modelled as a binary classification problem. The binary logistic regression approach tackles the binary classification problem, where principal components are predictor variables. If users or items are sparse in the training data, the binary classification problem can be considered as a cold-start problem. The binary logistic regression approach may not function appropriately if the principal components are inefficient for the cold-start problem. Assuming that the market basket data can also be considered as a special regression problem whose response is either 0 or 1, we propose three supervised learning approaches: random forest regression, random forest classification, and elastic net to tackle the cold-start problem, comparing the performance in a variety of experimental settings. The experimental results show that the proposed supervised learning approaches outperform the conventional approaches.