Cold-start User Recommendation via Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation

In recommendation systems, cold-start user recommendation is a challenging problem, where precise recommendations are required for users who have not appeared before. Several existing cold-start user recommendation models adopt domain adaptation to extract information from auxiliary source domains to assist the recommendations on the target domain. In this paper, we propose that the cold-start user recommendation problem can be formulated by the heterogeneous domain adaption approach. We determine a transformation of user features, e.g., user social relations and historical interactions between warm users and their interested items, into a latent space so that the loss function is set by user feature reconstruction and by feature and distribution matching in the heterogeneous domains. The resulting optimization problem can be solved by matrix eigendecomposition, and the cold-start users’ preferences can thus be obtained. We also extend the proposed model using neural networks. We perform extensive experiments on several real-world datasets, and the results in terms of Precision, Recall, NDCG, and Hit Rate verify the effectiveness of the proposed model.