Practical Recommender Systems

Chapter 6. The user (and content) who came in from the cold

Open your arms and put on a big smile; it’s time to learn how to greet new customers. In this chapter

• You’ll examine the cold-start problem that’s related to new customers.
• You’ll learn how to segment users, so you can look at semi-personalization.
• You’ll look at Redbubble.com as a case for cold-start problems with your newly acquired knowledge.
• You’ll look at an implementation of a simple personalize recommender using association rules.

We’re off to a cold start in this chapter, so put on your hat and gloves and let’s get started. In the previous chapter, we talked about how to get data, and luckily, most websites have data before they start adventures into recommender systems. But ...