Clustering-Based Frequent Pattern Mining Framework for Solving Cold-Start Problem in Recommender Systems

Recommender systems (RS) are substantial for online shopping or digital content services. However, due to some data characteristics or insufficient historical data, may encounter considerable difficulties impacting the quality of their recommendations. This study introduces the clustering-based frequent pattern mining framework for recommender systems (Clustering-based FPRS) - a novel RS constituting several recommendation strategies leveraging agglomerative clustering and FP-growth algorithms. The developed strategies combine the generated frequent itemsets with collaborative- and content-filtering methods to address the cold-start problem, which occurs whenever a new user or item enters the system. In such cases, the RS has limited information about the new user or object. Thus, the recommendations may be inaccurate. The experimental evaluation on several benchmark datasets showed that Clustering-based FPRS is superior to state-of-the-art and could effectively alleviate the cold-start problem.