Cold Start Problem Alleviation in a Research Paper Recommendation System Using the Random Walk Approach on a Heterogeneous User-Paper Graph

Recommendation approaches generally fail to recommend newly-published papers as relevant, owing to the lack of prior information about the said papers and, more particularly, problems associated with cold starts. It would appear, to all intents and purposes, that researchers currently interact more on social networks than they normally would in academic circles, and relationships of a purely academic nature have witnessed a paradigm shift, in keeping with this new trend. In existing paper recommendation methods, the social interaction factor has yet to play a pivotal role. The authors propose a social network-based research paper recommendation method, that alleviates cold start problems by incorporating users' social interaction, as well as topical relevancy, among assorted papers in the Mendeley academic social network using a novel approach, random walk Ergodic Markov Chain. The system yields improved results after cold start alleviation, compared with the existing system.