Cold-start solutions for recommendation systems

Recommendation systems are essential tools to overcome the choice overload problem by suggesting items of interest to users. However, they suffer from a major challenge which is the so-called cold-start problem. The cold-start problem typically happens when the system does not have any form of data on new users and on new items. In this chapter, we describe the cold-start problem in recommendation systems. We mainly focus on collaborative filtering systems which are the most popular approaches to build recommender systems and have been successfully employed in many real-world applications. Moreover, we discuss multiple scenarios that cold start may happen in these systems and explain different solutions for them.