Recommender System using Collaborative Filtering and Demographic Characteristics of Users

Recommender systems use variety of data mining techniques and algorithms to identify relevant preferences of items for users in a system out of available millions of choices. Recommender systems are classified into Collaborative filtering, Content-Based filtering, Knowledge-Based filtering and Hybrid filtering systems. The traditional recommender systems approaches are facing many challenges like data sparsity, cold start problem, scalability, synonymy, shilling attacks, gray sheep and black sheep problems. These problems consequently degrade the performance of recommender systems to a great extent. Among these cold start problem is one of the challenges which comes into scene when either a new user enters into a system or a new product arrives in catalogue. Both situations lead to difficulty in predicting user preferences due to non-availability of sufficient user rating history. The study proposes a new hybrid recommender system framework for solving new user cold-start problem by exploiting user demographic characteristics for finding similarity between new user and already existing users in the system. The efficiency of recommender systems can be improved by proposed approach which calculates recommendations for new user by predicting preferences within much smaller cluster rather than from the entire customer base. The analysis has been done using MovieLens dataset for enhancing the performance of online movie recommendation system. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15077