Combining novelty and popularity on personalised recommendations via user profile learning

•Quality of recommendations can improve with user profile learning.•Combining novelty and popularity generates personalised recommendations.•Automatic tuning in diffusion-based methods allows better results on sparse data. Recommender systems have been widely used by large companies in the e-commerce segment as aid tools in the search for relevant contents according to the user’s particular preferences. A wide variety of algorithms have been proposed in the literature aiming at improving the process of generating recommendations; in particular, a collaborative, diffusion-based hybrid algorithm has been proposed in the literature to solve the problem of sparse data, which affects the quality of recommendations. This algorithm was the basis for several others that effectively solved the sparse data problem. However, this family of algorithms does not differentiate users according to their profiles. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed for learning the user profile and, consequently, generating personalised recommendations through diffusion, combining novelty with the popularity of items. Experiments performed in well-known datasets show that the results of the proposed algorithm outperform those from both diffusion-based hybrid algorithm and traditional collaborative filtering algorithm, in the same settings.