Semi-supervised discriminative preference elicitation for cold-start recommendation.

Recommendation for cold users is fairly challenging because no prior rating can be used in preference prediction. To tackle this cold-start scenario, rating elicitation is usually employed through an initial interview in which users are queried by some carefully selected items. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to mine the most valuable items to construct query set using a semi-supervised discriminative selection (SSDS) model. To learn a low dimensional representation for users in item space which can reflect their tastes to a large extent, the model incorporates category labels as discriminative information. To ensure the used labels reliable as well as all users considered, the model utilizes a semi-supervised scheme leveraging expert guidance with graph regularization. Experimental results on real-world dataset MovieLens demonstrate that the proposed SSDS model outperforms traditional preference elicitation methods on top-N measures for cold-start recommendation.