A Cross-Domain Recommendation Mechanism for Cold-Start Users Based on Partial Least Squares Regression

Recommender systems are common in e-commerce platforms in recent years. Recommender systems are able to help users find preferential items among a large amount of products so that users’ time is saved and sellers’ profits are increased. Cross-domain recommender systems aim to recommend items based on users’ different tastes across domains. While recommender systems usually suffer from the user cold-start problem that leads to unsatisfying recommendation performance, cross-domain recommendation can remedy such a problem. This article proposes a novel cross-domain recommendation model based on regression analysis, partial least squares regression (PLSR). The proposed recommendation models, PLSR-CrossRec and PLSR-Latent, are able to purely use source-domain ratings to predict the ratings for cold-start users who never rated items in the target domains. Experiments conducted on the Epinions dataset with ten various domains’ rating records demonstrate that PLSR-Latent can outperform several matrix factorization-based competing methods under a variety of cross-domain settings. The time efficiency of PLSR-Latent is also satisfactory.