Solving Cold-Start Problem in Large-scale Recommendation Engines: A Deep Learning Approach
This addresses the cold-start problem for new items in large-scale recommendation systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing collaborative filtering frameworks.
The paper tackles the cold-start problem in collaborative filtering-based recommendation engines by introducing a deep learning approach that can be applied on top of existing systems without modifying the core, successfully tested on Careerbuilder's engine with high efficiency and maintained accuracy.
Collaborative Filtering (CF) is widely used in large-scale recommendation engines because of its efficiency, accuracy and scalability. However, in practice, the fact that recommendation engines based on CF require interactions between users and items before making recommendations, make it inappropriate for new items which haven't been exposed to the end users to interact with. This is known as the cold-start problem. In this paper we introduce a novel approach which employs deep learning to tackle this problem in any CF based recommendation engine. One of the most important features of the proposed technique is the fact that it can be applied on top of any existing CF based recommendation engine without changing the CF core. We successfully applied this technique to overcome the item cold-start problem in Careerbuilder's CF based recommendation engine. Our experiments show that the proposed technique is very efficient to resolve the cold-start problem while maintaining high accuracy of the CF recommendations.