Title
Addressing cold-start in app recommendation: latent user models constructed from twitter followers
Abstract
As a tremendous number of mobile applications (apps) are readily available, users have difficulty in identifying apps that are relevant to their interests. Recommender systems that depend on previous user ratings (i.e., collaborative filtering, or CF) can address this problem for apps that have sufficient ratings from past users. But for apps that are newly released, CF does not have any user ratings to base recommendations on, which leads to the cold-start problem. In this paper, we describe a method that accounts for nascent information culled from Twitter to provide relevant recommendation in such cold-start situations. We use Twitter handles to access an app's Twitter account and extract the IDs of their Twitter-followers. We create pseudo-documents that contain the IDs of Twitter users interested in an app and then apply latent Dirichlet allocation to generate latent groups. At test time, a target user seeking recommendations is mapped to these latent groups. By using the transitive relationship of latent groups to apps, we estimate the probability of the user liking the app. We show that by incorporating information from Twitter, our approach overcomes the difficulty of cold-start app recommendation and significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art recommendation techniques by up to 33%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2484028.2484035
SIGIR
Keywords
Field
DocType
user rating,past user,target user,base recommendation,twitter user,previous user rating,twitter account,twitter follower,latent dirichlet allocation,latent group,latent user model,cold-start app recommendation,cold start problem,collaborative filtering,recommender systems
Recommender system,World Wide Web,Latent Dirichlet allocation,Collaborative filtering,Cold start,Information retrieval,Computer science,Mobile apps,Cold start (automotive),Transitive relation
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
69
1.81
29
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jovian Lin1923.66
Kazunari Sugiyama269440.08
Min-yen Kan32786162.35
Tat-Seng Chua411749653.09