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Integrating trust and similarity to ameliorate the data sparsity and cold start for recommender systems

Our research aims to tackle the problems of data sparsity and cold start of traditional recommender systems. Insufficient ratings often result in poor quality of recommendations in terms of accuracy and coverage. To address these issues, we propose three different approaches from the perspective of preference modelling. Firstly, we propose to merge the ratings of trusted neighbors and thus form a new rating profile for the active users, based on which better recommendations can be generated. Secondly, we aim to make better use of user ratings and introduce a novel Bayesian similarity measure by taking into account both the direction and length of rating vectors. Thirdly, we propose a new information source called prior ratings based on virtual product experience in virtual reality environments, in order to inherently resolve the concerned problems.