Discovering E-commerce Sequential Data Sets and Sequential Patterns for Recommendation

In E-commerce recommendation system accuracy will be improved if more complex sequential patterns of user purchase behavior are learned and included in its user-item matrix input, to make it more informative before collaborative filtering. Existing recommendation systems that use mining techniques with some sequences are those referred to as LiuRec09, ChoiRec12, SuChenRec15, and HPCRec18. LiuRec09 system clusters users with similar clickstream sequence data, then uses association rule mining and segmentation based collaborative filtering to select Top-N neighbors from the cluster to which a target user belongs. ChoiRec12 derives a user’s rating for an item as the percentage of the user’s total number of purchases the user’s item purchase constitutes. SuChenRec15 system is based on clickstream sequence similarity using frequency of purchases of items, duration of time spent and clickstream path. HPCRec18 used historical item purchase frequency, consequential bond between clicks and purchases of items to enrich the user-item matrix qualitatively and quantitatively. None of these systems integrates sequential patterns of customer clicks or purchases to capture more complex sequential purchase behavior. This thesis proposes an algorithm called HSPRec (Historical Sequential Pattern Recommendation System), which first generates an E-Commerce sequential database from historical purchase data using another new algorithm SHOD (Sequential Historical Periodic Database Generation). Then, thesis mines frequent sequential purchase patterns before using these mined sequential patterns with consequential bonds between clicks and purchases to (i) improve the user-item matrix quantitatively, (ii) used historical purchase frequencies to further enrich ratings qualitatively. Thirdly, the improved matrix is used as input to collaborative filtering algorithm for better recommendations. Experimental results with mean absolute error, precision and recall show that the proposed sequential pattern mining-based recommendation system, HSPRec provides more accurate recommendations than the tested existing systems

Recommending Best Products from E-commerce Purchase History and User Click Behavior Data

E-commerce collaborative filtering recommendation systems, the main input data of user-item rating matrix is a binary purchase data showing only what items a user has purchased recently. This matrix is usually sparse and does not provide a lot of information about customer purchases or product clickstream behavior (eg., clicks, basket placement, and purchase) history, which possibly can improve product recommendations accuracy. Existing recommendation systems in E-commerce with clickstream data include those referred in this thesis as Kim05Rec, Kim11Rec, and Chen13Rec. Kim05Rec forms a decision tree on click behavior attributes such as search type and visit times, discovers the possibility of a user putting products into the basket and uses the information to enrich the user-item rating matrix. If a user clicked a product, Kim11Rec then finds the associated products for it in three stages such as click, basket and purchase, uses the lift value from these stages and calculates a score, it then uses the score to make recommendations. Chen13Rec measures the similarity of users on their category click patterns such as click sequences, click times and visit duration; it then can use the similarity to enhance the collaborative filtering algorithm. However, the similarity between click sequences in sessions can apply to the purchases to some extent, especially for sessions without purchases, this will be able to predict purchases for those session users. But the existing systems have not integrated it, or the historical purchases which shows more than whether or not a user has purchased a product before. In this thesis, we propose HPCRec (Historical Purchase with Clickstream based Recommendation System) to enrich the ratings matrix from both quantity and quality aspects. HPCRec firstly forms a normalized rating-matrix with higher quality ratings from historical purchases, then mines consequential bond between clicks and purchases with weighted frequencies where the weights are similarities between sessions, but rating quantity is better by integrating this information. The experimental results show that our approach HPCRec is more accurate than these existing methods, HPCRec is also capable of handling infrequent cases whereas the existing methods can not

Improving E-Commerce Recommendations using High Utility Sequential Patterns of Historical Purchase and Click Stream Data

Recommendation systems not only aim to recommend products that suit the taste of consumers but also generate higher revenue and increase customer loyalty for e-commerce companies (such as Amazon, Netflix). Recommendation systems can be improved if user purchase behaviour are used to improve the user-item matrix input to Collaborative Filtering (CF). This matrix is mostly sparse as in real-life, a customer would have bought only very few products from the hundreds of thousands of products in the e-commerce shelf. Thus, existing systems like Kim11Rec, HPCRec18 and HSPRec19 systems use the customer behavior information to improve the accuracy of recommendations. Kim11Rec system used behavior and navigations patterns which were not used earlier. HPCRec18 system used purchase frequency and consequential bond between click and purchased data to improve the user-item frequency matrix. The HSPRec19 system converts historic click and purchase data to sequential data and enhances the user-item frequency matrix with the sequential pattern rules mined from the sequential data for input to the CF. HSPRec19 system generates recommendations based on frequent sequential purchase patterns and does not capture whether the recommended items are also of high utility to the seller (e.g., are more profitable?).The thesis proposes a system called High Utility Sequential Pattern Recommendation System (HUSRec System), which is an extension to the HSPRec19 system that replaces frequent sequential patterns with use of high utility sequential patterns. The proposed HUSRec generates a high utility sequential database from ACM RecSys Challenge dataset using the HUSDBG (High Utility Sequential Database Generator) and HUSPM (High Utility Sequential Pattern Miner) mines the high utility sequential pattern rules which can yield high sales profits for the seller based on quantity and price of items on daily basis, as they have at least the minimum sequence utility. This improves the accuracy of the recommendations. The proposed HUSRec mines clicks sequential data using PrefixSpan algorithm to give frequent sequential rules to suggest items where no purchase has happened, decreasing the sparsity of user-item matrix, improving the user-item matrix for input to the collaborative filtering. Experimental results with mean absolute error, precision and graphs show that the proposed HUSRec system provides more accurate recommendations and higher revenue than the tested existing systems. Keywords: Data mining, Sequential pattern mining, Collaborative filtering, High utility pattern mining, E-commerce recommendation systems

Personalized information systems : enabling technologies and architecture

Personalized Information Systems are ICT applications that exhibit personalized behaviour, adjusted to the preferences or needs of their users. Personalized Information Systems can bring up business benefits related to customer relationship or to increased efficiency of organizational work. This work characterizes the Personalized Information Systems in what concerns types of personalized features, presents the enabling technologies, and suggests a general architecture for Personalized Information Systems.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

A hybrid recommendation approach for a tourism system

Many current e-commerce systems provide personalization when their content is shown to users. In this sense, recommender systems make personalized suggestions and provide information of items available in the system. Nowadays, there is a vast amount of methods, including data mining techniques that can be employed for personalization in recommender systems. However, these methods are still quite vulnerable to some limitations and shortcomings related to recommender environment. In order to deal with some of them, in this work we implement a recommendation methodology in a recommender system for tourism, where classification based on association is applied. Classification based on association methods, also named associative classification methods, consist of an alternative data mining technique, which combines concepts from classification and association in order to allow association rules to be employed in a prediction context. The proposed methodology was evaluated in some case studies, where we could verify that it is able to shorten limitations presented in recommender systems and to enhance recommendation quality

Alter ego, state of the art on user profiling: an overview of the most relevant organisational and behavioural aspects regarding User Profiling.

This report gives an overview of the most relevant organisational and\ud behavioural aspects regarding user profiling. It discusses not only the\ud most important aims of user profiling from both an organisation’s as\ud well as a user’s perspective, it will also discuss organisational motives\ud and barriers for user profiling and the most important conditions for\ud the success of user profiling. Finally recommendations are made and\ud suggestions for further research are given