Resolving the Cold-Start Issue in Recommender Systems with Reinforcement Learning

The cold-start problem faced by recommender systems is a serious problem, mainly because of the lack of historical data for new users or items. Traditional recommendation techniques, such as collaborative filtering and content-based filtering, are prone to fail in making good recommendations under such conditions. This paper explores the use of reinforcement learning (RL) as a remedy for cold-start problems based on active learning methods and multi-armed bandit models. We propose a novel RL-based approach that learns user preferences incrementally from interaction and improves recommendations in an exploration-exploitation setting. The setting shows improved performance in personalization and user engagement compared to baseline methods. This paper also provides the first-order implications of the cold-start problem in the real world and assesses the challenges faced by industries impacted by this problem. Keywords - Recommender systems, cold-start problem, reinforcement learning, Markov decision processes, deep reinforcement learning, user modelling