Deriving Item Features Relevance from Past User Interactions

Item-based recommender systems suggest products based on the similarities between items computed either from past user preferences (collaborative filtering) or from item content features (content-based filtering). Collaborative filtering has been proven to outperform content-based filtering in a variety of scenarios. However, in item cold-start, collaborative filtering cannot be used directly since past user interactions are not available for the newly added items. Hence, content-based filtering is usually the only viable option left.