Evolutionary intelligent agents for e-commerce: Generic preference detection with feature analysis

Product recommendation and preference tracking systems have been adopted extensively in e-commerce businesses. However, the heterogeneity of product attributes results in undesired impediment for an efficient yet personalized e-commerce product brokering. Amid the assortment of product attributes, there are some intrinsic generic attributes having significant relation to a customer’s generic preference. This paper proposes a novel approach in the detection of generic product attributes through feature analysis. The objective is to provide an insight to the understanding of customers’ generic preference. Furthermore, a genetic algorithm is used to find the suitable feature weight set, hence reducing the rate of misclassification. A prototype has been implemented and the experimental results are promising

Contextual Sequence Modeling for Recommendation with Recurrent Neural Networks

Recommendations can greatly benefit from good representations of the user state at recommendation time. Recent approaches that leverage Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for session-based recommendations have shown that Deep Learning models can provide useful user representations for recommendation. However, current RNN modeling approaches summarize the user state by only taking into account the sequence of items that the user has interacted with in the past, without taking into account other essential types of context information such as the associated types of user-item interactions, the time gaps between events and the time of day for each interaction. To address this, we propose a new class of Contextual Recurrent Neural Networks for Recommendation (CRNNs) that can take into account the contextual information both in the input and output layers and modifying the behavior of the RNN by combining the context embedding with the item embedding and more explicitly, in the model dynamics, by parametrizing the hidden unit transitions as a function of context information. We compare our CRNNs approach with RNNs and non-sequential baselines and show good improvements on the next event prediction task

Learning and Transferring IDs Representation in E-commerce

Many machine intelligence techniques are developed in E-commerce and one of the most essential components is the representation of IDs, including user ID, item ID, product ID, store ID, brand ID, category ID etc. The classical encoding based methods (like one-hot encoding) are inefficient in that it suffers sparsity problems due to its high dimension, and it cannot reflect the relationships among IDs, either homogeneous or heterogeneous ones. In this paper, we propose an embedding based framework to learn and transfer the representation of IDs. As the implicit feedbacks of users, a tremendous amount of item ID sequences can be easily collected from the interactive sessions. By jointly using these informative sequences and the structural connections among IDs, all types of IDs can be embedded into one low-dimensional semantic space. Subsequently, the learned representations are utilized and transferred in four scenarios: (i) measuring the similarity between items, (ii) transferring from seen items to unseen items, (iii) transferring across different domains, (iv) transferring across different tasks. We deploy and evaluate the proposed approach in Hema App and the results validate its effectiveness.Comment: KDD'18, 9 page