Innovative Firm Performance Management Using a Recommendation System Based on Fuzzy Association Rules: The Case of Vietnam’s Apparel Small and Medium Enterprises

Purpose: This study aims to apply a classification algorithm based-on fuzzy association rules (FARs) to improve the effectiveness of firms' performance prediction problem. Particularly, this study investigates potential FARs exists between inputs and outputs of firms' performance management process. These extracted FARs could be used to help firm’s managers make better dicision to improve firm’s performance.   Theoretical framework: Private enterprise development has been identified as key to Vietnam's economy that was commonly depended on state enterprise. For that, understanding and improving firms' performance and productivity is one of the most important tasks, from both macro and micro perspectives. There have been many studies on Vietnam's firm performance, but mostly relying on econometric methods that limit the understanding with structural equations. This study, instead, attempts to utilize new achievements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for this task. Among AI techniques, fuzzy association rule is able to address the relationship between input factors and firm performance indicators. For each company, the finding FARs can be used to predict its performance and then change the business plan or react to improve weekness of organization.   Design/Methodology/Approach: The proposal model is applied on data of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of the apparel industry in Vietnam in the period 2010-2015. The sample consist of a total of 23637 observation of  Vietnam firms in apparel and textile industry and contains 16 main criterias for those firms.   Finding: A recommendation system (RS) is constructed from disclosed FARs and is a key factor in a novel innovative firms' performance management process. The percentage of classified instances using the mining FARs is not quite high (about 82%), but it is not always the case. Vietnam’s apparel dataset includes rare classes of ROA, therefore applying only frequent FARs is not enough. This issue can be fixed by using both frequent and infrequent FARs.       Research, practical & social implications: The proposed model has a great opportunity to use not only in the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of the apparel industry but other industrial sectors. FARs support the well-understand of firm performance to firm’s manager and help them better to react. Besides, FARs could be used to create RSs that makes alerts about risk automatically.   Originality/Value: The fact, our current study is the first to inspect the ability of FARs on SMEs of the apparel industry in Vietnam. This study provides theoritical potential knowledge and empirical evidence in the application of FARs technology in innovative firm’s management

Survey of data mining approaches to user modeling for adaptive hypermedia

The ability of an adaptive hypermedia system to create tailored environments depends mainly on the amount and accuracy of information stored in each user model. Some of the difficulties that user modeling faces are the amount of data available to create user models, the adequacy of the data, the noise within that data, and the necessity of capturing the imprecise nature of human behavior. Data mining and machine learning techniques have the ability to handle large amounts of data and to process uncertainty. These characteristics make these techniques suitable for automatic generation of user models that simulate human decision making. This paper surveys different data mining techniques that can be used to efficiently and accurately capture user behavior. The paper also presents guidelines that show which techniques may be used more efficiently according to the task implemented by the applicatio

Online Shopping Decisions Enhancement with Fuzzy Expert System

Purpose Nowadays, due to the rapid development of the Internet and the rapid growth of web pages, many electronic websites are using product recommendation systems to guide users to the products that they need. Such systems usually provide a list of suggested items that the user may prefer. These systems are provided as a support tool to help users obtain information that best meets their needs. These systems can actually improve user decisions, resulting in increased sales and mutual customer satisfaction. The purpose of the paper is to improve user decisions in online shopping using fuzzy expert system. Methodology: The statistical population of this study consists of 30 experts in the field of e-commerce who were selected by combining two methods of deliberate sampling and snowball sampling. To analyze the status of improvement of users' decisions, a fuzzy expert system was created using input variables business reputation status, environmental factors status in e-commerce, online store features; product specifications; user/customer characteristics. Findings: The final results showed that there is no significant difference between the results of the created expert system and the mean of expert opinions. Originality/Value: In this paper, a conceptual Model to improve user decisions in online shopping using a fuzzy expert system is designed

Big data analytics:Computational intelligence techniques and application areas

Big Data has significant impact in developing functional smart cities and supporting modern societies. In this paper, we investigate the importance of Big Data in modern life and economy, and discuss challenges arising from Big Data utilization. Different computational intelligence techniques have been considered as tools for Big Data analytics. We also explore the powerful combination of Big Data and Computational Intelligence (CI) and identify a number of areas, where novel applications in real world smart city problems can be developed by utilizing these powerful tools and techniques. We present a case study for intelligent transportation in the context of a smart city, and a novel data modelling methodology based on a biologically inspired universal generative modelling approach called Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal State Machine (HSTSM). We further discuss various implications of policy, protection, valuation and commercialization related to Big Data, its applications and deployment

Automated user modeling for personalized digital libraries

Digital libraries (DL) have become one of the most typical ways of accessing any kind of digitalized information. Due to this key role, users welcome any improvements on the services they receive from digital libraries. One trend used to improve digital services is through personalization. Up to now, the most common approach for personalization in digital libraries has been user-driven. Nevertheless, the design of efficient personalized services has to be done, at least in part, in an automatic way. In this context, machine learning techniques automate the process of constructing user models. This paper proposes a new approach to construct digital libraries that satisfy user’s necessity for information: Adaptive Digital Libraries, libraries that automatically learn user preferences and goals and personalize their interaction using this information

Recommendation technique-based government-to-business personalized e-services

One of the new directions in current e-government development is to provide personalized online services to citizens and businesses. Recommendation techniques can bring a possible solution for this issue. This study proposes a hybrid recommendation approach to provide personalized government to business (G2B) e-services. The approach integrates fuzzy sets-based semantic similarity and traditional item-based collaborative filtering methods to improve recommendation accuracy. A recommender system named Intelligent Business Partner Locator (IBPL) is designed to apply the proposed recommendation approach for supporting government agencies to recommend business partners. ©2009 IEEE

Next Generation of Product Search and Discovery

Online shopping has become an important part of people’s daily life with the rapid development of e-commerce. In some domains such as books, electronics, and CD/DVDs, online shopping has surpassed or even replaced the traditional shopping method. Compared with traditional retailing, e-commerce is information intensive. One of the key factors to succeed in e-business is how to facilitate the consumers’ approaches to discover a product. Conventionally a product search engine based on a keyword search or category browser is provided to help users find the product information they need. The general goal of a product search system is to enable users to quickly locate information of interest and to minimize users’ efforts in search and navigation. In this process human factors play a significant role. Finding product information could be a tricky task and may require an intelligent use of search engines, and a non-trivial navigation of multilayer categories. Searching for useful product information can be frustrating for many users, especially those inexperienced users. This dissertation focuses on developing a new visual product search system that effectively extracts the properties of unstructured products, and presents the possible items of attraction to users so that the users can quickly locate the ones they would be most likely interested in. We designed and developed a feature extraction algorithm that retains product color and local pattern features, and the experimental evaluation on the benchmark dataset demonstrated that it is robust against common geometric and photometric visual distortions. Besides, instead of ignoring product text information, we investigated and developed a ranking model learned via a unified probabilistic hypergraph that is capable of capturing correlations among product visual content and textual content. Moreover, we proposed and designed a fuzzy hierarchical co-clustering algorithm for the collaborative filtering product recommendation. Via this method, users can be automatically grouped into different interest communities based on their behaviors. Then, a customized recommendation can be performed according to these implicitly detected relations. In summary, the developed search system performs much better in a visual unstructured product search when compared with state-of-art approaches. With the comprehensive ranking scheme and the collaborative filtering recommendation module, the user’s overhead in locating the information of value is reduced, and the user’s experience of seeking for useful product information is optimized

A Survey on Web Usage Mining

Now a day World Wide Web become very popular and interactive for transferring of information. The web is huge, diverse and active and thus increases the scalability, multimedia data and temporal matters. The growth of the web has outcome in a huge amount of information that is now freely offered for user access. The several kinds of data have to be handled and organized in a manner that they can be accessed by several users effectively and efficiently. So the usage of data mining methods and knowledge discovery on the web is now on the spotlight of a boosting number of researchers. Web usage mining is a kind of data mining method that can be useful in recommending the web usage patterns with the help of users2019; session and behavior. Web usage mining includes three process, namely, preprocessing, pattern discovery and pattern analysis. There are different techniques already exists for web usage mining. Those existing techniques have their own advantages and disadvantages. This paper presents a survey on some of the existing web usage mining techniques

Prediction Techniques in Internet of Things (IoT) Environment: A Comparative Study

Socialization and Personalization in Internet of Things (IOT) environment are the current trends in computing research. Most of the research work stresses the importance of predicting the service & providing socialized and personalized services. This paper presents a survey report on different techniques used for predicting user intention in wide variety of IOT based applications like smart mobile, smart television, web mining, weather forecasting, health-care/medical, robotics, road-traffic, educational data mining, natural calamities, retail banking, e-commerce, wireless networks & social networking. As per the survey made the prediction techniques are used for: predicting the application that can be accessed by the mobile user, predicting the next page to be accessed by web user, predicting the users favorite TV program, predicting user navigational patterns and usage needs on websites & also to extract the users browsing behavior, predicting future climate conditions, predicting whether a patient is suffering from a disease, predicting user intention to make implicit and human-like interactions possible by accepting implicit commands, predicting the amount of traffic occurring at a particular location, predicting student performance in schools & colleges, predicting & estimating the frequency of natural calamities occurrences like floods, earthquakes over a long period of time & also to take precautionary measures, predicting & detecting false user trying to make transaction in the name of genuine user, predicting the actions performed by the user to improve the business, predicting & detecting the intruder acting in the network, predicting the mood transition information of the user by using context history, etc. This paper also discusses different techniques like Decision Tree algorithm, Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining based Machine learning techniques, Content and Collaborative based Recommender algorithms used for prediction