Semantic data mining and linked data for a recommender system in the AEC industry

Even though it can provide design teams with valuable performance insights and enhance decision-making, monitored building data is rarely reused in an effective feedback loop from operation to design. Data mining allows users to obtain such insights from the large datasets generated throughout the building life cycle. Furthermore, semantic web technologies allow to formally represent the built environment and retrieve knowledge in response to domain-specific requirements. Both approaches have independently established themselves as powerful aids in decision-making. Combining them can enrich data mining processes with domain knowledge and facilitate knowledge discovery, representation and reuse. In this article, we look into the available data mining techniques and investigate to what extent they can be fused with semantic web technologies to provide recommendations to the end user in performance-oriented design. We demonstrate an initial implementation of a linked data-based system for generation of recommendations

A Temporal Usage Pattern-based Tag Recommendation Approach

While social tagging can benefit Internet users managing their resources, it suffers the problems such as diverse and/or unchecked vocabulary and unwillingness to tag. Use of freely new tags and/or reuse of frequent tags have degraded coherence of corresponding resources of each tag that further frustrates people in retrieving information due to cognitive dissonance. Tag recommender systems can recommend users the most relevant tags to the resource they intend to annotate, and drastically transfer the tagging process from generation to recognition to reduce user’s cognitive effort and time. Prior research on tag recommendation has addressed the time-dependence issues of tags by applying a time decaying measure to determine the recurrence probability of a tag according to its recency instead of its usage pattern. In response, this study intends to propose the temporal usage pattern-based tag recommendation technique to consider the usage patterns and temporal characteristic of tags for making recommendations

Improving e-commerce product recommendation using semantic context and sequential historical purchases

Collaborative Filtering (CF)-based recommendation methods suffer from (i) sparsity (have low user–item interactions) and (ii) cold start (an item cannot be recommended if no ratings exist). Systems using clustering and pattern mining (frequent and sequential) with similarity measures between clicks and purchases for next-item recommendation cannot perform well when the matrix is sparse, due to rapid increase in number of items. Additionally, they suffer from: (i) lack of personalization: patterns are not targeted for a specific customer and (ii) lack of semantics among recommended items: they can only recommend items that exist as a result of a matching rule generated from frequent sequential purchase pattern(s). To better understand users’ preferences and to infer the inherent meaning of items, this paper proposes a method to explore semantic associations between items obtained by utilizing item (products’) metadata such as title, description and brand based on their semantic context (co-purchased and co-reviewed products). The semantics of these interactions will be obtained through distributional hypothesis, which learns an item’s representation by analyzing the context (neighborhood) in which it is used. The idea is that items co-occurring in a context are likely to be semantically similar to each other (e.g., items in a user purchase sequence). The semantics are then integrated into different phases of recommendation process such as (i) preprocessing, to learn associations between items, (ii) candidate generation, while mining sequential patterns and in collaborative filtering to select top-N neighbors and (iii) output (recommendation). Experiments performed on publically available E-commerce data set show that the proposed model performed well and reflected user preferences by recommending semantically similar and sequential products

Semantic enhanced Markov model for sequential E-commerce product recommendation

To model sequential relationships between items, Markov Models build a transition probability matrix P of size n× n, where n represents number of states (items) and each matrix entry p(i,j) represents transition probabilities from state i to state j. Existing systems such as factorized personalized Markov chains (FPMC) and fossil either combine sequential information with user preference information or add the high-order Markov chains concept. However, they suffer from (i) model complexity: an increase in Markov Model’s order (number of states) and separation of sequential pattern and user preference matrices, (ii) sparse transition probability matrix: few product purchases from thousands of available products, (iii) ambiguous prediction: multiple states (items) having same transition probability from current state and (iv) lack of semantic knowledge: transition to next state (item) depends on probabilities of items’ purchase frequency. To alleviate sparsity and ambiguous prediction problems, this paper proposes semantic-enabled Markov model recommendation (SEMMRec) system which inputs customers’ purchase history and products’ metadata (e.g., title, description and brand) and extract products’ sequential and semantic knowledge according to their (i) usage (e.g., products co-purchased or co-reviewed) and (ii) textual features by finding similarity between products based on their characteristics using distributional hypothesis methods (Doc2vec and TF-IDF) which consider the context of items’ usage. Next, this extracted knowledge is integrated into the transition probability matrix P to generate personalized sequential and semantically rich next item recommendations. Experimental results on various E-commerce data sets exhibit an improved performance by the proposed model