Eliciting Customer Preferences for Products From Navigation Behavior on the Web: A Multicriteria Decision Approach With Implicit Feedback

The goal of raising customer loyalty in electronic commerce requires an emphasis on one-to-one marketing and personalized services. To this end, it is essential to understand individual customer preferences for products. In this paper, we present a method for identifying customer preferences and recommending the most appropriate product. The identification and recommendation of such products are all based on the use of customer's real-time web usage behavior, including activities such as viewing, basket placement, and purchasing of products. Therefore, in this approach, we do not force a customer to explicitly express his or her preference information for particular products but rather capture his or her preferences from data that result from such activities. Information on the web usage behavior for the products determines the ordinal relationships among the products, which express that certain product is preferred to other products across the multiple aspects. The ordinal relationships among the products and the multiple aspects of products lead to the consideration of a multiple-criteria decision-making approach. Thus, the problem eventually results in the identification of weights attached to the multiple criteria in the multidimensional preference space constructed by the ordinal relationships among the products. The derived weights are then used for the prioritization of products that are not included in the navigation behavior due to factors such as time pressure, cognitive burden, and the like.     

Moving recommender systems from on-line commerce to retail stores

The increasing diversity of consumers’ demand, as documented by the debate on the long tail of the distribution of sales volume across products, represents a challenge for retail stores. Recommender systems offer a tool to cope with this challenge. The recent developments in information technology and ubiquitous computing makes it feasible to move recommender systems from the on-line commerce, where they are widely used, to retail stores. In this paper, we aim to bridge the management literature and the computer science literature by analysing a number of issues that arise when applying recommender systems to retail stores: these range from the format of the stores that would benefit most from recommender systems to the impact of coverage and control of recommender systems on customer loyalty and competition among retail stores.     

Cisco Connect Online: it's good for business

Until the massive growth of the World Wide Web, business to business electronic commerce was limited to functions appropriate for expensive proprietary WANs and a lot of custom software. But all that has changed. Networked commerce isn't about back room applications any more. Successful businesses must interact with suppliers and customers around the world. The benefits of a standard IP protocol, combined with increasingly sophisticated commodity hardware and software, make it relatively easy for companies of all sizes to link their suppliers, partners, and customers in a bidirectional flow of information. The Internet has become a tool used to reduce transaction costs, shorten product cycles, expand markets, and-most important-provide rapid response to the customer's changing needs. Internet commerce in goods and services between companies was estimated at US$8 billion in 1997, according to Forrester Research in Boston. International Data Corporation estimates that business to business sales over the Internet will represent $81.2 billion by 2000. Manufacturing companies lead the way, and Cisco Systems leads the manufacturers. Its Web site, Cisco Connection Online (CCO), launched in August 1996, now generates almost $10 million in sales per day-around $600 million in three months from August through September 1997. Cisco Systems specifically uses the Internet to distribute software and technical data, as well as customer support     

浅析电子商务安全策略

随着互联网的全面普及,基于Internet开展的电子商务已逐渐成为人们进行商务活动的新模式,越来越多的企业和个人通过Internet进行商务活动,电子商务的发展前景十分诱人,而商业信息的安全是电子商务的首要问题。本文从实现电子商务安全性的基本框架出发,对电子商务中的各种安全技术进行了分析,以探讨一种有效、安全的实现电子商务的途径。     

Secure Web Transaction with Anonymous Mobile Agent over Internet

A major problem of mobile agents is their apparent inability to authenticate transactions in hostile environments. In this paper, a new secure anonymous mobile agent scheme is proposed for the prevention of agent tempering without compromising the mobility or autonomy of the agent. In the scheme, a mobile agent can produce valid signature on website's bid (it means to transact a contact with the web site) on behalf of its customer, without revealing the customer's real private key. In addition, the anonymity of the customer is also achieved when its agent transacts with the websites. Furthermore, the customer who issues a malicious agent or denies the transaction can be identified and detected by Agent Management Center (AMC). Therefore, the scheme is practical in the future electronic commerce over Internet.     

基于极端评分行为的相似度计算

随着互联网技术的迅猛发展,互联网信息急剧增长,信息过载问题愈发凸显。面对海量的互联网信息,用户往往需要耗费大量的时间来搜索所需的信息或产品,而搜索的解往往受到制约。为解决信息过载问题,推荐系统应运而生。推荐系统根据用户的历史行为推测其需求、兴趣等,将用户感兴趣的信息、产品等推荐给用户。作为推荐领域中一类重要的推荐方法,基于记忆的协同过滤方法通常依据用户或产品的近邻信息来构造评分预测函数,其核心在于准确度量用户或产品之间的相似度。传统的相似度量,如皮尔逊、余弦及秩相关系数等,通常只考虑了用户之间的线性关系;而启发式相似度如基于3个特殊因子的PIP相似度及其改进方法,则只刻画了用户之间的非线性关系。事实上,在推荐系统中,就用户之间的相似关系而言,仅用线性或是非线性函数来度量均是不准确的。为了更为精细地刻画用户之间的相似程度,文中提出了基于非线性函数的用户极端评分行为的相似程度度量指数,通过将该指数融入传统的线性相关系数,构造了一个考虑极端评分行为的新的相似度。为验证该方法的有效性,基于Ml(100k)和Ml-latest-small两个数据集,将其与传统相似度以及启发式相似度进行比较,结果显示基于极端评分行为相似度的协同过滤方法在MAE和RMSE指标上能够获得更好的表现。     

A Graphical Model for Context-Aware Visual Content Recommendation

Existing recommender systems provide an elegant solution to the information overload in current digital libraries such as the Internet archive. Nowadays, the sensors that capture the user's contextual information such as the location and time are become available and have raised a need to personalize recommendations for each user according to his/her changing needs in different contexts. In addition, visual documents have richer textual and visual information that was not exploited by existing recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a new framework for context-aware recommendation of visual documents by modeling the user needs, the context and also the visual document collection together in a unified model. We address also the user's need for diversified recommendations. Our pilot study showed the merits of our approach in content based image retrieval.     

A query expansion and user profile enrichment approach to improve the performance of recommender systems operating on a folksonomy

In this paper we propose a query expansion and user profile enrichment approach to improve the performance of recommender systems operating on a folksonomy, storing and classifying the tags used to label a set of available resources. Our approach builds and maintains a profile for each user. When he submits a query (consisting of a set of tags) on this folksonomy to retrieve a set of resources of his interest, it automatically finds further “authoritative” tags to enrich his query and proposes them to him. All “authoritative” tags considered interesting by the user are exploited to refine his query and, along with those tags directly specified by him, are stored in his profile in such a way to enrich it. The expansion of user queries and the enrichment of user profiles allow any content-based recommender system operating on the folksonomy to retrieve and suggest a high number of resources matching with user needs and desires. Moreover, enriched user profiles can guide any collaborative filtering recommender system to proactively discover and suggest to a user many resources relevant to him, even if he has not explicitly searched for them.     

A novel social network hybrid recommender system based on hypergraph topologic structure

With the advent and popularity of social network, more and more people like to share their experience in social network. However, network information is growing exponentially which leads to information overload. Recommender system is an effective way to solve this problem. The current research on recommender systems is mainly focused on research models and algorithms in social networks, and the social networks structure of recommender systems has not been analyzed thoroughly and the so-called cold start problem has not been resolved effectively. We in this paper propose a novel hybrid recommender system called Hybrid Matrix Factorization(HMF) model which uses hypergraph topology to describe and analyze the interior relation of social network in the system. More factors including contextual information, user feature, item feature and similarity of users ratings are all taken into account based on matrix factorization method. Extensive experimental evaluation on publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed hybrid recommender system outperforms the existing recommender systems in tackling cold start problem and dealing with sparse rating datasets. Our system also enjoys improved recommendation accuracy compared with several major existing recommendation approaches.     

An agent-based recommender system for developing customized families of products

Electronic markets and web-based content have improved traditional product development processes by increasing the participation of customers and applying various recommender systems to satisfy individual customer needs. Agent-based systems based on agents’ roles and tasks can provide appropriate tools to solve product design problems by recommending design knowledge and information. This paper introduces an agent-based recommender system to support designing families of products based on customers’ preferences in dynamic electronic market environments. In the proposed system, a market-based learning mechanism is applied to determine the customers’ preferences for recommending appropriate products to customers of the product family. We demonstrate the implementation of the proposed recommender system using a multi-agent framework. Through simulated experiments, we illustrate that the proposed recommender system can help determine the preference values of products for customized recommendation and market segment design in various electronic market environments.     

An agent‐based approach for managing e‐commerce activities

In this article, we propose an agent‐based approach for managing e‐commerce activities. In our approach, an agent is present in each e‐commerce site, managing the information stored there. In addition, another agent is associated with each customer, handling his/her profile. The proposed approach is based on the use of a particular conceptual model called the Behaviour‐Semantic Distance and Relevance (B‐SDR) network, which is capable of uniformly representing and handling information stored in e‐commerce sites and customer profiles. The capabilities of the B‐SDR network model are exploited to let customer and site agents cooperate in such a way in order to support a customer in identifying, whenever he/she accesses an e‐commerce site, those products and services present in the site itself and for better matching his/her interests. The approach has been implemented in a prototype in which its functionalities are discussed here also. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Detection of the customer time-variant pattern for improving recommender systems

Due to the explosion of e-commerce, recommender systems are rapidly becoming a core tool to accelerate cross-selling and strengthen customer loyalty. There are two prevalent approaches for building recommender systems—content-based recommending and collaborative filtering. So far, collaborative filtering recommender systems have been very successful in both information filtering and e-commerce domains. However, the current research on recommendation has paid little attention to the use of time-related data in the recommendation process. Up to now there has not been any study on collaborative filtering to reflect changes in user interest.This paper suggests a methodology for detecting a user's time-variant pattern in order to improve the performance of collaborative filtering recommendations. The methodology consists of three phases of profiling, detecting changes, and recommendations. The proposed methodology detects changes in customer behavior using the customer data at different periods of time and improves the performance of recommendations using information on changes.     

基于耦合相似度的矩阵分解推荐方法

随着因特网和信息技术的高速发展,信息过载现象越来越严重。推荐系统能够给个人和商家(例如电子商务和零售商)提供个性化的推荐。数据稀疏性和分数预测质量问题被公认为是现存推荐系统中的主要挑战。当前绝大多数推荐系统技术都依赖于协同过滤方法,它主要利用用户-项目评分矩阵来表示用户和项目之间的关系。一些研究利用附加信息来提高推荐准确性,但是,绝大多数现存的引入项目之间关系的方法并不能很好地用于预测和推荐,因为其假设项目属性之间是独立同分布的,而实际上项目(或用户)的属性之间是存在耦合关系的。由此提出了基于属性耦合关系的矩阵分解模型,它能有效地刻画项目之间的耦合相关性,从而更加合理 地预测用户对项目的评分。实验结果表明,所提出的模型在热启动和冷启动的推荐准确性方面均优于传统的推荐算法。     

Decision-making in the aisles: informing, overwhelming or nudging supermarket shoppers?

Recent findings suggest that while shopping people apply ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics: short-cut strategies where they ignore most product information and instead focus on a few key cues. But rather than supporting this practice, mobile phone shopping apps and recommender systems overwhelm shoppers with information. This paper examines the amount and structure of product information that is most appropriate for supermarket shoppers, finding that in supermarkets, people rapidly make decisions based on one or two product factors for routine purchases, often trading-off between price and health. For one-off purchases, shoppers can be influenced by reading customer star ratings and reviews on a mobile phone app. In order to inform decision-making or nudge shoppers in supermarkets, we propose using embedded technologies that provide appropriate feedback and make key information salient. We conclude that rather than overwhelming shoppers, future shopping technology design needs to focus on information frugality and simplicity.     

Recommender Systems Research: A Connection-Centric Survey

Recommender systems attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers by selecting a subset of items from a universal set based on user preferences. While research in recommender systems grew out of information retrieval and filtering, the topic has steadily advanced into a legitimate and challenging research area of its own. Recommender systems have traditionally been studied from a content-based filtering vs. collaborative design perspective. Recommendations, however, are not delivered within a vacuum, but rather cast within an informal community of users and social context. Therefore, ultimately all recommender systems make connections among people and thus should be surveyed from such a perspective. This viewpoint is under-emphasized in the recommender systems literature. We therefore take a connection-oriented perspective toward recommender systems research. We posit that recommendation has an inherently social element and is ultimately intended to connect people either directly as a result of explicit user modeling or indirectly through the discovery of relationships implicit in extant data. Thus, recommender systems are characterized by how they model users to bring people together: explicitly or implicitly. Finally, user modeling and the connection-centric viewpoint raise broadening and social issues—such as evaluation, targeting, and privacy and trust—which we also briefly address.     

Multistakeholder recommendation: Survey and research directions

Recommender systems provide personalized information access to users of Internet services from social networks to e-commerce to media and entertainment. As is appropriate for research in a field with a focus on personalization, academic studies of recommender systems have largely concentrated on optimizing for user experience when designing, implementing and evaluating their algorithms and systems. However, this concentration on the user has meant that the field has lacked a systematic exploration of other aspects of recommender system outcomes. A user-centric approach limits the ability to incorporate system objectives, such as fairness, balance, and profitability, and obscures concerns that might come from other stakeholders, such as the providers or sellers of items being recommended. Multistakeholder recommendation has emerged as a unifying framework for describing and understanding recommendation settings where the end user is not the sole focus. This article outlines the multistakeholder perspective on recommendation, highlighting example research areas and discussing important issues, open questions, and prospective research directions.

     

Mining affective needs of automotive industry customers for building a mass-customization recommender system

Mass customization systems aim to receive customer preferences in order to facilitate personalization of products and services. Current online configuration systems are unable to efficiently identify real customer affective needs because they offer an excess variety of products that usually confuse customers. On the other hand, mining affective customer needs may result in recommender systems, which can enhance existing configuration systems by recommending initial configurations according to customer affective needs. This paper introduces a mass customization recommender system that exploits data mining techniques on automotive industry customer data aiming at revealing associations between user affective needs and the design parameters of automotive products. One key novelty of the presented approach is that it deploys the Citarasa engineering, a methodology that focuses on the provision of the appropriate characterizations on customer data in order to associate them with customer affective needs. Based on the application of classification techniques we build a recommendation engine, which is evaluated in terms of user satisfaction, tool’s effectiveness, usefulness and reliability among other parameters.     

协同过滤推荐系统综述

随着互联网和信息计算的飞速发展,衍生了海量数据,我们已经进入信息爆炸的时代。网络中各种信息量的指数型增长导致用户想要从大量信息中找到自己需要的信息变得越来越困难,信息过载问题日益突出。推荐系统在缓解信息过载问题中起着非常重要的作用,该方法通过研究用户的兴趣偏好进行个性化计算,由系统发现用户兴趣进而引导用户发现自己的信息需求。目前,推荐系统已经成为产业界和学术界关注、研究的热点问题,应用领域十分广泛。在电子商务、会话推荐、文章推荐、智慧医疗等多个领域都有所应用。传统的推荐算法主要包括基于内容的推荐、协同过滤推荐以及混合推荐。其中,协同过滤推荐是推荐系统中应用最广泛最成功的技术之一。该方法利用用户或物品间的相似度以及历史行为数据对目标用户进行推荐,因此存在用户冷启动和项目冷启动问题。此外,随着信息量的急剧增长,传统协同过滤推荐系统面对数据的快速增长会遇到严重的数据稀疏性问题以及可扩展性问题。为了缓解甚至解决这些问题,推荐系统研究人员进行了大量的工作。近年来,为了提高推荐效果、提升用户满意度,学者们开始关注推荐系统的多样性问题以及可解释性等问题。由于深度学习方法可以通过发现数据中用户和项目之间的非线性关系从而学习一个有效的特征表示,因此越来越受到推荐系统研究人员的关注。目前的工作主要是利用评分数据、社交网络信息以及其他领域信息等辅助信息,结合深度学习、数据挖掘等技术提高推荐效果、提升用户满意度。对此,本文首先对推荐系统以及传统推荐算法进行概述,然后重点介绍协同过滤推荐算法的相关工作。包括协同过滤推荐算法的任务、评价指标、常用数据集以及学者们在解决协同过滤算法存在的问题时所做的工作以及努力。最后提出未来的几个可研究方向。     

基于知识的电子商务智能推荐系统平台设计

分析了传统推荐技术存在的不足,阐述了基于知识的推荐技术的特点及其发展。针对现有基于知识的电子商务推荐系统中存在的不足,提出了基于知识的电子商务智能推荐需要解决的基本问题,设计了基于知识的电子商务智能推荐平台的逻辑框架,并阐述了其工作原理。     

Personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries

Widespread use of the Internet has resulted in digital libraries that are increasingly used by diverse communities of users for diverse purposes and in which sharing and collaboration have become important social elements. As such libraries become commonplace, as their contents and services become more varied, and as their patrons become more experienced with computer technology, users will expect more sophisticated services from these libraries. A simple search function, normally an integral part of any digital library, increasingly leads to user frustration as user needs become more complex and as the volume of managed information increases. Proactive digital libraries, where the library evolves from being passive and untailored, are seen as offering great potential for addressing and overcoming these issues and include techniques such as personalisation and recommender systems. In this paper, following on from the DELOS/NSF Working Group on Personalisation and Recommender Systems for Digital Libraries, which met and reported during 2003, we present some background material on the scope of personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries. We then outline the working group’s vision for the evolution of digital libraries and the role that personalisation and recommender systems will play, and we present a series of research challenges and specific recommendations and research priorities for the field.