A Novel Framework Leveraging Social Media Insights to Address the Cold-Start Problem in Recommendation Systems

In today’s world, with rapidly developing technology, it has become possible to perform many transactions over the internet. Consequently, providing better service to online customers in every field has become a crucial task. These advancements have driven companies and sellers to recommend tailored products to their customers. Recommendation systems have emerged as a field of study to ensure that relevant and suitable products can be presented to users. One of the major challenges in recommendation systems is the cold-start problem, which arises when there is insufficient information about a newly introduced user or product. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that leverages implicit behavioral insights from users’ X social media activity to construct personalized profiles without requiring explicit user input. In the proposed model, users’ behavioral profiles are first derived from their social media data. Then, recommendation lists are generated to address the cold-start problem by employing Boosting algorithms. The framework employs six boosting algorithms to classify user preferences for the top 20 most-rated films on Letterboxd. In this way, a solution is offered without requiring any additional external data beyond social media information. Experiments on a dataset demonstrate that CatBoost outperforms other methods, achieving an F1-score of 0.87 and MAE of 0.21. Based on experimental results, the proposed system outperforms existing methods developed to solve the cold-start problem.