Session context data integration to address the cold start problem in e-commerce recommender systems

Abstract

Recommender systems play an important role in identifying and filtering relevant products based on the behaviours of users. Nevertheless, recommender systems suffer from the ‘cold-start’ problem, which occurs when no prior information about a new session or a user is available. Many approaches to solving the cold-start problem have been presented in the literature. However, there is still room for improving the performance of recommender systems in the cold-start stage. In this article, we present a novel method to alleviate the cold-start problem in session-based recommender systems. The purpose of this work is to develop a session similarity-based cold-start session alleviation approach for recommendation systems. The developed method uses previous sessions’ contextual and temporal features to find sessions similar to the newly started one. Our results on three different datasets show that, based on the provided Mean Average Precision and Normalised Discounted Cumulative Gain scores, the Session Similarity-based Framework consistently outperforms baseline models in terms of recommendation relevance and ranking quality across three used datasets. Our approach can be used to address the challenges associated with cold start sessions where no previously interacted items are present.