User profiling approaches for demographic recommender systems

Many of our daily life decisions rely on demographic data, which is a good indicator for closeness of people. However, the lack of these data for many online systems let them search for explicit or implicit alternatives. Among many, collaborative filtering is the alternative solutions especially for e-commerce applications where many users are reluctant to disclose their demographic data. This paper explores, discusses and examines many user-profiling approaches for demographic recommender systems (DRSs). These approaches span many alternatives for profiling users in terms of the attribute types, attribute representations, and the profiling way. We present layout, description, and appropriate similarity computation methods for each one of them. A detailed comparison between these different approaches is given using many experiments conducted on a real dataset. The pros and cons of each approach are illustrated for more advantage that may open a window for future work. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.