Authors:
            
                    Aleksandra Karpus
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Tommaso Di Noia
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Paolo Tomeo
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                     and
                
                    Krzysztof Goczyla
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    
                
        
        
            Affiliations:
            
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland
                
                    ; 
                
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                    Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy
                
        
        
        
        
        
             Keyword(s):
            Recommender Systems, Context Awareness, Conditional Preferences, Rating Prediction, Cold-start Problem.
        
        
            
                Related
                    Ontology
                    Subjects/Areas/Topics:
                
                        Artificial Intelligence
                    ; 
                        Collaborative Filtering
                    ; 
                        Context Discovery
                    ; 
                        Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval
                    ; 
                        Knowledge-Based Systems
                    ; 
                        Symbolic Systems
                    ; 
                        User Profiling and Recommender Systems
                    
            
        
        
            
                Abstract: 
                Exploiting contextual information is considered a good solution to improve the quality of recommendations, aiming at suggesting more relevant items for a specific context. On the other hand, recommender systems research still strive for solving the cold-start problem, namely where not enough information about users and their ratings is available. In this paper we propose a new rating prediction algorithm to face the cold-start system scenario, based on user interests model called contextual conditional preferences. We present results obtained with three publicly available data sets in comparison with several state-of-the-art baselines. We show that usage of contextual conditional preferences improves the prediction accuracy, even when all users have provided a few feedbacks, and hence small amount of data is available.