An effective recommender system by unifying user and item trust information for B2B applications

© 2015 Elsevier Inc. Although Collaborative Filtering (CF)-based recommender systems have received great success in a variety of applications, they still under-perform and are unable to provide accurate recommendations when users and items have few ratings, resulting in reduced coverage. To overcome these limitations, we propose an effective hybrid user-item trust-based (HUIT) recommendation approach in this paper that fuses the users' and items' implicit trust information. We have also considered and computed user and item global reputations into this approach. This approach allows the recommender system to make an increased number of accurate predictions, especially in circumstances where users and items have few ratings. Experiments on four real-world datasets, particularly a business-to-business (B2B) case study, show that the proposed HUIT recommendation approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms in terms of recommendation accuracy and coverage, as well as significantly alleviating data sparsity, cold-start user and cold-start item problems

Comparative Analysis of Different Trust Metrics of User-User Trust-Based Recommendation System

Information overload is the biggest challenge nowadays for any website, especially e-commerce websites. However, this challenge arises for the fast growth of information on the web (WWW) with easy access to the internet. Collaborative filtering based recommender system is the most useful application to solve the information overload problem by filtering relevant information for the users according to their interests. But, the existing system faces some significant limitations such as data sparsity, low accuracy, cold-start, and malicious attacks. To alleviate the mentioned issues, the relationship of trust incorporates in the system where it can be between the users or items, and such system is known as the trust-based recommender system (TBRS). From the user perspective, the motive of the TBRS is to utilize the reliability between the users to generate more accurate and trusted recommendations. However, the study aims to present a comparative analysis of different trust metrics in the context of the type of trust definition of TBRS. Also, the study accomplishes twenty-four trust metrics in terms of the methodology, trust properties \& measurement, validation approaches, and the experimented dataset

Building a User-Based Recommendation System Using a Model-Based Collaborative Filtering Approach

The modern day internet faces a very famous problem called information overload. Where the amount of information is huge and the need for personalized results to match ones preferences for ease of access to other information like it. This is especially a problem in the e-commerce and streaming industries where the amount of items available is massive and users need a way to surf through results quickly and efficiently to find the exact items they are looking for and possibly look at similar recommendations. Modern day recommendation engines use user-item data to find items an active user may like based on other users with similar preferences and provide recommendations. This paper looks at a model based approach, specifically collaborative filtering, to providing accurate recommendations. The model will be made based on normal predictor, singular vector decomposition, k-nearest neighbour, and slope one and the performance and accuracy of the models will be compared against each other to see the comparison between them

Improved collaborative filtering using clustering and association rule mining on implicit data

The recommender systems are recently becoming more significant due to their ability in making decisions on appropriate choices. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is the most successful and most applied technique in the design of a recommender system where items to an active user will be recommended based on the past rating records from like-minded users. Unfortunately, CF may lead to poor recommendation when user ratings on items are very sparse (insufficient number of ratings) in comparison with the huge number of users and items in user-item matrix. In the case of a lack of user rating on items, implicit feedback is used to profile a user’s item preferences. Implicit feedback can indicate users’ preferences by providing more evidences and information through observations made on users’ behaviors. Data mining technique, which is the focus of this research, can predict a user’s future behavior without item evaluation and can too, analyze his preferences. In order to investigate the states of research in CF and implicit feedback, a systematic literature review has been conducted on the published studies related to topic areas in CF and implicit feedback. To investigate users’ activities that influence the recommender system developed based on the CF technique, a critical observation on the public recommendation datasets has been carried out. To overcome data sparsity problem, this research applies users’ implicit interaction records with items to efficiently process massive data by employing association rules mining (Apriori algorithm). It uses item repetition within a transaction as an input for association rules mining, in which can achieve high recommendation accuracy. To do this, a modified preprocessing has been employed to discover similar interest patterns among users. In addition, the clustering technique (Hierarchical clustering) has been used to reduce the size of data and dimensionality of the item space as the performance of association rules mining. Then, similarities between items based on their features have been computed to make recommendations. Experiments have been conducted and the results have been compared with basic CF and other extended version of CF techniques including K-Means Clustering, Hybrid Representation, and Probabilistic Learning by using public dataset, namely, Million Song dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique exhibits improvements of an average of 20% in terms of Precision, Recall and Fmeasure metrics when compared to the basic CF technique. Our technique achieves even better performance (an average of 15% improvement in terms of Precision and Recall metrics) when compared to the other extended version of CF techniques, even when the data is very sparse

The Influence of Online Product Recommendations on Consumer Choice-Making Confidence, Effort, and Satisfaction

The number of products and services available online is growing at a tremendous pace. Consumers increasingly desire the ability to filter through the noise and quickly discover the products that are most relevant to their needs. Many businesses are implementing product recommender systems to provide this ability to consumers, and the result is often increased sales and more satisfied customers. However, recommender systems can also have negative consequences for consumers. For example, a recommender system can bias consumers to purchase more expensive products. Additionally, theories of consumer choice-making suggest that recommender systems can sometimes make purchase choices more difficult, resulting in outcomes that are contrary to the intended purposes of the system, such as customers expending greater shopping effort and feeling less satisfied as a result of receiving too many suggestions. The purpose of this dissertation is to further explore when recommender systems can negatively affect consumers’ online shopping experiences. I investigate three research questions: 1) When do product recommendations increase, rather than decrease, shopping effort? 2) When do product recommendations decrease, rather than increase, shopping satisfaction? And 3) When do recommender systems decrease, rather than increase, consumers’ choice-making confidence? I propose to study these questions by conducting an experiment using a fictitious retail website and online survey

Artificial intelligence in business-to-business marketing: a bibliometric analysis of current research status, development and future directions

Purpose-Although the value of AI has been acknowledged by companies, the literature shows challenges concerning AI-enabled B2B marketing innovation, as well as the diversity of roles AI can play in this regard. Accordingly, this study investigates the approaches that AI can be used for enabling B2B marketing innovation. Design/methodology/approach-Applying a bibliometric research method, this study systematically investigates the literature regarding AI-enabled B2B marketing. It synthesises state-of-the-art knowledge from 221 journal articles published between 1990 and 2021. Findings-Apart from offering specific information regarding the most influential authors and most frequently cited articles, the study further categorises the use of AI for innovation in B2B marketing into five domains, identified the main trends in the literature, and suggest directions for future research. Practical implications-Through our identified five domains, practitioners can assess their current use of AI ability in terms of their conceptualisation capability, technological applications, and identify their future needs in the relevant domains in order to make appropriate decisions on whether to invest in AI. Thus, the research outcomes can help companies to realise their digital marketing innovation strategy through AI. Originality/value-While more and more studies acknowledge the potential value of AI in B2B marketing, few attempts have been made to synthesise the literature. The results from the study can contribute by 1) obtaining and comparing the most influential works based on a series of analyses; 2) identifying five domains of research into how AI can be used for facilitating B2B marketing innovation; and 3) classifying relevant articles into five different time periods in order to identify both past trends and future directions in this specific field

Algoritmo Híbrido de Recomendação

Nesta era tecnológica em que nos encontramos há cada vez mais informação disponível na internet, mas grande parte dessa informação não é relevante. Isto leva à necessidade de criar maneiras de filtrar informação, de forma a reduzir o tempo de recolha de informação útil. Esta necessidade torna o uso de sistemas de recomendação muito apelativo, visto estes personalizarem as pesquisas de forma a ajudar os seus utilizadores a fazer escolhas mais informadas. Os sistemas de recomendação procuram recomendar os itens mais relevantes aos seus utilizadores, no entanto necessitam de informação sobre os utilizadores e os itens, de forma a melhor os poder organizar e categorizar. Há vários tipos de sistemas de recomendação, cada um com as suas forças e fraquezas. De modo a superar as limitações destes sistemas surgiram os sistemas de recomendação híbridos, que procuram combinar características dos diferentes tipos de sistemas de recomendação de modo a reduzir, ou eliminar, as suas fraquezas. Uma das limitações dos sistemas de recomendação acontece quando o próprio sistema não tem informação suficiente para fazer recomendações. Esta limitação tem o nome de Cold Start e pode focar-se numa de duas áreas: quando a falta de informação vem do utilizador, conhecida como User Cold Start; e quando a falta de informação vem de um item, conhecida como Item Cold Start. O foco desta dissertação é no User Cold Start, nomeadamente na criação de um sistema de recomendação híbrido capaz de lidar com esta situação. A abordagem apresentada nesta dissertação procura combinar a segmentação de clientes com regras de associação. O objetivo passa por descobrir os utilizadores mais similares aos utilizadores numa situação de Cold Start e, através dos itens avaliados pelos utilizadores mais similares, recomendar os itens considerados mais relevantes, obtidos através de regras de associação. O algoritmo híbrido apresentado nesta dissertação procura e classifica todos os tipos de utilizadores. Quando um utilizador numa situação de Cold Start está à procura de recomendações, o sistema encontra itens para recomendar através da aplicação de regras de associação a itens avaliados por utilizadores no mesmo grupo que o utilizador na situação de Cold Start, cruzando essas regras com os itens avaliados por este último e apresentando as recomendações com base no resultado.Recommender systems, or recommenders, are a way to filter the useful information from the data, in this age where there is a lot of available data. A recommender system’s purpose is to recommend relevant items to users, and to do that, it requires information on both, data from users and from items, to better organise and categorise both of them. There are several types of recommenders, each best suited for a specific purpose, and with specific weaknesses. Then there are hybrid recommenders, made by combining one or more types of recommenders in a way that each type supresses, or at least limits, the weaknesses of the other types. A very important weakness of recommender systems occurs when the system doesn’t have enough information about something and so, it cannot make a recommendation. This problem known as a Cold Start problem is addressed in this thesis. There are two types of Cold Start problems: those where the lack of information comes from a user (User Cold Start) and those where it comes from an item (Item Cold Start). This thesis’ main focus is on User Cold Start problems. A novel approach is introduced in this thesis which combines clients’ segmentation with association rules. The goal is first, finding the most similar users to cold start users and then, with the items rated by these similar users, recommend those that are most suitable, which are gotten through association rules. The hybrid algorithm presented in this thesis finds and classifies all users’ types. When a user in a Cold Start situation is looking for recommendations, the system finds the items to recommend to him by applying association rules to the items evaluated by users in the same user group as the Cold Start user, crossing them with the few items evaluated by the Cold Start user and finally making its recommendations based on that