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Record W4416079291 · doi:10.1051/ro/2025151

Addressing the cold start problem in privacy preserving content-based recommender systems using hypercube graphs

2025· article· W4416079291 on OpenAlexaff
Noa Tuval, Alain Hertz, Tsvi Kuflik

Bibliographic record

VenueRAIRO. Operations research · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldComputer Science
TopicRecommender Systems and Techniques
Canadian institutionsPolytechnique Montréal
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCold start (automotive)Recommender systemCollaborative filteringHypercubeService (business)Simple (philosophy)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The initial interaction of a user with a recommender system is problematic because, in such a so-called cold start situation, the recommender system has very little information about the user, if any. Moreover, in collaborative filtering, users need to share their preferences with the service provider by rating items while in content-based filtering there is no need for such information sharing. A content-based model using hypercube graphs has recently been proposed and appears to be able to estimate user profiles based on a very limited number of ratings while preserving user privacy. In this paper, we confirm these findings on the basis of experiments with more than 1000 users in the restaurant and movie domains. We show that the proposed method outperforms standard machine learning algorithms when the number of available ratings is at most 10, which often happens, and is competitive with larger training sets. In addition, training is simple and doesn’t require large computational efforts.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.007
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.022
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.007
Threshold uncertainty score0.037

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0070.022
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.002
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0020.002
Scholarly communication0.0020.006
Open science0.0030.003
Research integrity0.0030.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.498
GPT teacher head0.448
Teacher spread0.050 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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