A WEB‐BASED PERSONALIZED BUSINESS PARTNER RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM USING FUZZY SEMANTIC TECHNIQUES

The web provides excellent opportunities to businesses in various aspects of development such as finding a business partner online. However, with the rapid growth of web information, business users struggle with information overload and increasingly find it difficult to locate the right information at the right time. Meanwhile, small and medium businesses (SMBs), in particular, are seeking “one‐to‐one” e‐services from government in current highly competitive markets. How can business users be provided with information and services specific to their needs, rather than an undifferentiated mass of information? An effective solution proposed in this study is the development of personalized e‐services. Recommender systems is an effective approach for the implementation of Personalized E‐Service which has gained wide exposure in e‐commerce in recent years. Accordingly, this paper first presents a hybrid fuzzy semantic recommendation (HFSR) approach which combines item‐based fuzzy semantic similarity and item‐based fuzzy collaborative filtering (CF) similarity techniques. This paper then presents the implementation of the proposed approach into an intelligent recommendation system prototype called Smart BizSeeker, which can recommend relevant business partners to individual business users, particularly for SMBs. Experimental results show that the HFSR approach can help overcome the semantic limitations of classical CF‐based recommendation approaches, namely sparsity and new “cold start” item problems.     

User‐centred design and educational data mining support during the recommendations elicitation process in social online learning environments

Social online learning environments provide new recommendation opportunities to meet users' needs. However, current educational recommender systems do not usually take advantage of these opportunities. To progress on this issue, we have proposed a knowledge engineering approach based on human–computer interaction (i.e. user‐centred design as defined by the standard ISO 9241‐210:2010) and artificial intelligence techniques (i.e. data mining) that involve educators in the process of eliciting educational oriented recommendations. To date, this approach differs from most recommenders in education in focusing on identifying relevant actions to be recommended on e‐learning services from a user‐centric perspective, thus widening the range of recommendation types. This approach has been used to identify 32 recommendations that consider several types of actions, which focus on promoting active participation of learners and on strengthening the sharing of experiences among peers through the usage of the social services provided by the learning environment. The paper describes where data mining techniques have been applied to complement the user‐centred design methods to produce social oriented recommendations in online learning environments.     

A hybrid trust‐enhanced collaborative filtering recommendation approach for personalized government‐to‐business e‐services

The information overload on the World Wide Web results in the underuse of some existing e‐government services within the business domain. Small‐to‐medium businesses (SMBs), in particular, are seeking “one‐to‐one'' e‐services from government in current highly competitive markets, and there is an imperative need to develop Web personalization techniques to provide business users with information and services specific to their needs, rather than an undifferentiated mass of information. This paper focuses on how e‐governments can support businesses on the problem of selecting a trustworthy business partner to perform reliable business transactions. In the business partner selection process, trust or reputation information is crucial and has significant influence on a business user's decision regarding whether or not to do business with other business entities. For this purpose, an intelligent trust‐enhanced recommendation approach to provide personalized government‐to‐business (G2B) e‐services, and in particular, business partner recommendation e‐services for SMBs is proposed. Accordingly, in this paper, we develop (1) an implicit trust filtering recommendation approach and (2) an enhanced user‐based collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation approach. To further exploit the advantages of the two proposed approaches, we develop (3) a hybrid trust‐enhanced CF recommendation approach (TeCF) that integrates both the proposed implicit trust filtering and the enhanced user‐based CF recommendation approaches. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches, especially the hybrid TeCF recommendation approach in terms of improving accuracy, as well as in dealing with very sparse data sets and cold‐start users. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

An algorithm for efficient privacy-preserving item-based collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) methods are widely adopted by existing recommender systems, which can analyze and predict user “ratings” or “preferences” of newly generated items based on user historical behaviors. However, privacy issue arises in this process as sensitive user private data are collected by the recommender server. Recently proposed privacy-preserving collaborative filtering (PPCF) methods, using computation-intensive cryptography techniques or data perturbation techniques are not appropriate in real online services. In this paper, an efficient privacy-preserving item-based collaborative filtering algorithm is proposed, which can protect user privacy during online recommendation process without compromising recommendation accuracy and efficiency. The proposed method is evaluated using the Netflix Prize dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms a randomized perturbation based PPCF solution and a homomorphic encryption based PPCF solution by over 14X and 386X, respectively, in recommendation efficiency while achieving similar or even better recommendation accuracy.     

Typicality‐based collaborative filtering for book recommendation

Nowadays, personalized recommender system placed an important role to predict the customer needs, interest about particular product in various application domains, which is identified according to the product ratings. During this process, collaborative filtering (CF) has been utilized because it is one of familiar techniques in recommender systems. The conventional CF methods analyse historical interactions of user‐item pairs based on known ratings and then use these interactions to produce recommendations. The major challenge in CF is that it needs to calculate the similarity of each pair of users or items by observing the ratings of users on same item, whereas the typicality‐based CF determines the neighbours from user groups based on their typicality degree. Typicality‐based CF can predict the ratings of users with improved accuracy. However, to eliminate the cold start problem in the proposed recommender system, the demographic filtering method has been employed in addition to the typicality‐based CF. A weighted average scheme has been applied on the combined recommendation results of both typicality‐based CF and demographic‐based CF to produce the best recommendation result for the user. Thereby, the proposed system has been able to achieve a coverage ratio of more than 95%, which indicates that the system is able to provide better recommendation for the user from the available lot of products.     

Collaborative filtering and deep learning based recommendation system for cold start items

Recommender system is a specific type of intelligent systems, which exploits historical user ratings on items and/or auxiliary information to make recommendations on items to the users. It plays a critical role in a wide range of online shopping, e-commercial services and social networking applications. Collaborative filtering (CF) is the most popular approaches used for recommender systems, but it suffers from complete cold start (CCS) problem where no rating record are available and incomplete cold start (ICS) problem where only a small number of rating records are available for some new items or users in the system. In this paper, we propose two recommendation models to solve the CCS and ICS problems for new items, which are based on a framework of tightly coupled CF approach and deep learning neural network. A specific deep neural network SADE is used to extract the content features of the items. The state of the art CF model, timeSVD++, which models and utilizes temporal dynamics of user preferences and item features, is modified to take the content features into prediction of ratings for cold start items. Extensive experiments on a large Netflix rating dataset of movies are performed, which show that our proposed recommendation models largely outperform the baseline models for rating prediction of cold start items. The two proposed recommendation models are also evaluated and compared on ICS items, and a flexible scheme of model retraining and switching is proposed to deal with the transition of items from cold start to non-cold start status. The experiment results on Netflix movie recommendation show the tight coupling of CF approach and deep learning neural network is feasible and very effective for cold start item recommendation. The design is general and can be applied to many other recommender systems for online shopping and social networking applications. The solution of cold start item problem can largely improve user experience and trust of recommender systems, and effectively promote cold start items.     

基于SaaS模式的电子商务推荐平台

针对一些电子商务网站缺乏资源难以实施推荐系统的现状,提出一种基于“软件即服务”(SaaS)模式的推荐服务架设方式并实现了原型平台。该平台使用统一的脚本收集电子商务网站的用户行为信息,并通过标准的接口提供推荐服务,从而实现平台与电子商务网站的低耦合以降低部署成本。平台上线运行结果表明,该模式的推荐服务能够有效帮助电子商务网站提升转化率和增加订单量。     

Mining affective needs of automotive industry customers for building a mass-customization recommender system

Mass customization systems aim to receive customer preferences in order to facilitate personalization of products and services. Current online configuration systems are unable to efficiently identify real customer affective needs because they offer an excess variety of products that usually confuse customers. On the other hand, mining affective customer needs may result in recommender systems, which can enhance existing configuration systems by recommending initial configurations according to customer affective needs. This paper introduces a mass customization recommender system that exploits data mining techniques on automotive industry customer data aiming at revealing associations between user affective needs and the design parameters of automotive products. One key novelty of the presented approach is that it deploys the Citarasa engineering, a methodology that focuses on the provision of the appropriate characterizations on customer data in order to associate them with customer affective needs. Based on the application of classification techniques we build a recommendation engine, which is evaluated in terms of user satisfaction, tool’s effectiveness, usefulness and reliability among other parameters.     

Swallow: Resource and Tag Recommender System Based on Heat Diffusion Algorithm in Social Annotation Systems

Social annotation systems (SAS) allow users to annotate different online resources with keywords (tags). These systems help users in finding, organizing, and retrieving online resources to significantly provide collaborative semantic data to be potentially applied by recommender systems. Previous studies on SAS had been worked on tag recommendation. Recently, SAS‐based resource recommendation has received more attention by scholars. In the most of such systems, with respect to annotated tags, searched resources are recommended to user, and their recent behavior and click‐through is not taken into account. In the current study, to be able to design and implement a more precise recommender system, because of previous users' tagging data and users' current click‐through, it was attempted to work on the both resource (such as web pages, research papers, etc.) and tag recommendation problem. Moreover, by applying heat diffusion algorithm during the recommendation process, more diverse options would present to the user. After extracting data, such as users, tags, resources, and relations between them, the recommender system so called “Swallow” creates a graph‐based pattern from system log files. Eventually, following the active user path and observing heat conduction on the created pattern, user further goals are anticipated and recommended to him. Test results on SAS data set demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has improved the accuracy of former recommendation algorithms.     

New Recommendation Techniques for Multicriteria Rating Systems

Personalization technologies and recommender systems help online consumers avoid information overload by making suggestions regarding which information is most relevant to them. Most online shopping sites and many other applications now use recommender systems. Two new recommendation techniques leverage multicriteria ratings and improve recommendation accuracy as compared with single-rating recommendation approaches. Taking full advantage of multicriteria ratings in personalization applications requires new recommendation techniques. In this article, we propose several new techniques for extending recommendation technologies to incorporate and leverage multicriteria rating information.     

A strategy-oriented operation module for recommender systems in E-commerce

Electronic commerce (EC) has become an important support for business and is regarded as an efficient system that connects suppliers with online users. Among the applications of EC, a recommender system (RS) is undoubtedly a popular issue to make the best recommendation to the users. Even if many approaches have been proposed to perfect the recommendation, a comprehensive module comprising of essential sub-modules of input profiles, a recommendation scheme, and an output interface of recommendations in the RS is still lacking. Besides, the fundamental issue of profit consideration for an EC company is not stressed in general terms. Therefore, this study aims to construct an RS with a strategy-oriented operation module regarding the above aspects; and with this module, an approach named clique-effects collaborative filtering (CECF) for predicting the consumer's purchase behavior was proposed. Finally, we applied our proposed module to a 3C retailer in Taiwan, and promising results were obtained.

Scope and Purpose

This study aims to construct a comprehensive module for the recommender systems. The proposed strategy-oriented operation module comprises the essential parts of a recommender system. By utilizing the proposed module with marketing strategies and an effective on-line interface scheme, the recommender system could emphasize not only the customer's satisfaction as conventional recommender system suggested, but also the supplier's profit which shall be an important issue to an E-commerce company. Thus, a better recommendation environment could be displayed.     

Preference reasoning with soft constraints in constraint-based recommender systems

A recommender system (RS) supports online users in e-commerce by proposing products that are assumed to be both useful and interesting. Knowledge-based recommendation systems form one branch of these online sales support systems that is particularly relevant for high-involvement product domains like consumer electronics, financial services or tourism. A constraint-based RS is a specific variant of a knowledge-based RS that builds on a CSP formalism for problem representation and solving. This article formalizes the different variants of a constraint-based recommendation problem based on consistency and the empirical part compares the performance of different constraint-based recommendation mechanisms in offline experiments on historical data.     

A tourism destination recommender system using users’ sentiment and temporal dynamics

With the development and popularity of social networks, an increasing number of consumers prefer to order tourism products online, and like to share their experiences on social networks. Searching for tourism destinations online is a difficult task on account of its more restrictive factors. Recommender system can help these users to dispose information overload. However, such a system is affected by the issue of low recommendation accuracy and the cold-start problem. In this paper, we propose a tourism destination recommender system that employs opinion-mining technology to refine user sentiment, and make use of temporal dynamics to represent user preference and destination popularity drifting over time. These elements are then fused with the SVD+ + method by combining user sentiment and temporal influence. Compared with several well-known recommendation approaches, our method achieves improved recommendation accuracy and quality. A series of experimental evaluations, using a publicly available dataset, demonstrates that the proposed recommender system outperforms the existing recommender systems.     

An adaptive doctor-recommender system

ABSTRACT

Recommender systems use machine-learning techniques to make predictions about resources. The medical field is one where much research is currently being conducted on recommender system utility. In the last few years, the amount of information available online that relates to healthcare has increased tremendously. Patients nowadays are more aware and look for answers to healthcare problems online. This has resulted in a dire need of an effective reliable online system to recommend the physician that is best suited to a particular patient in a limited time. In this article, a hybrid doctor-recommender system is proposed, by combining different recommendation approaches: content base, collaborative and demographic filtering to effectively tackle the issue of doctor recommendation. The proposed system addresses the issue of personalization through analysing patient's interest towards selecting a doctor. It uses a novel adoptive algorithm to construct a doctor's ranking function. Moreover, this ranking function is used to translate patients’ criteria for selecting a doctor into a numerical base rating, which will eventually be used in the recommendation of doctors. The system has been evaluated thoroughly, and result show that recommendations are reasonable and can fulfil patient's demand for reliable doctor's selection effectively.     

旅游推荐系统研究综述

为用户提供个性化推荐服务并提高推荐的准确度和用户满意度,是当前旅游推荐系统的主要研究任务。文中分析了旅游推荐系统与传统推荐系统的异同点,并从基于内容的推荐、基于协同过滤的推荐、基于知识的推荐、基于人口统计的推荐、混和型推荐以及基于位置感知的推荐共6个方面考查了旅游推荐的研究现状。在此基础上,给出了旅游推荐系统的一个总体框架。最后,总结分析了旅游推荐系统面临的6个重点和难点问题,并指出了下一步需要关注的研究方向。     

基于知识的电子商务智能推荐系统平台设计

分析了传统推荐技术存在的不足,阐述了基于知识的推荐技术的特点及其发展。针对现有基于知识的电子商务推荐系统中存在的不足,提出了基于知识的电子商务智能推荐需要解决的基本问题,设计了基于知识的电子商务智能推荐平台的逻辑框架,并阐述了其工作原理。     

Contextual music information retrieval and recommendation: State of the art and challenges

Increasing amount of online music content has opened new opportunities for implementing new effective information access services–commonly known as music recommender systems–that support music navigation, discovery, sharing, and formation of user communities. In the recent years a new research area of contextual (or situational) music recommendation and retrieval has emerged. The basic idea is to retrieve and suggest music depending on the user’s actual situation, for instance emotional state, or any other contextual conditions that might influence the user’s perception of music. Despite the high potential of such idea, the development of real-world applications that retrieve or recommend music depending on the user’s context is still in its early stages. This survey illustrates various tools and techniques that can be used for addressing the research challenges posed by context-aware music retrieval and recommendation. This survey covers a broad range of topics, starting from classical music information retrieval (MIR) and recommender system (RS) techniques, and then focusing on context-aware music applications as well as the newer trends of affective and social computing applied to the music domain.     

Personalized recommender system based on friendship strength in social network services

The rapid growth of social network services has produced a considerable amount of data, called big social data. Big social data are helpful for improving personalized recommender systems because these enormous data have various characteristics. Therefore, many personalized recommender systems based on big social data have been proposed, in particular models that use people relationship information. However, most existing studies have provided recommendations on special purpose and single-domain SNS that have a set of users with similar tastes, such as MovieLens and Last.fm; nonetheless, they have considered closeness relation. In this paper, we introduce an appropriate measure to calculate the closeness between users in a social circle, namely, the friendship strength. Further, we propose a friendship strength-based personalized recommender system that recommends topics or interests users might have in order to analyze big social data, using Twitter in particular. The proposed measure provides precise recommendations in multi-domain environments that have various topics. We evaluated the proposed system using one month's Twitter data based on various evaluation metrics. Our experimental results show that our personalized recommender system outperforms the baseline systems, and friendship strength is of great importance in personalized recommendation.     

Proactive and reactive e-government services recommendation

Governmental portals designed to provide electronic services are generally overloaded with information that may hinder the effectiveness of e-government services. This paper proposes a new framework to supply citizens with adapted content and personalized services that satisfy their requirements and fit with their profiles in order to guarantee universal access to governmental services. The proposed reactive and proactive solutions combine several recommendation techniques that use different data sources i.e., citizen profile, social media databases, citizen’s feedback databases and service databases. It is shown that recommender systems provide citizens with accessible personalized e-government services.     

Exploiting two-faceted web of trust for enhanced-quality recommendations

Traditional collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems on the basis of user similarity often suffer from low accuracy because of the difficulty in finding similar users. Incorporating trust network into CF-based recommender system is an attractive approach to resolve the neighbor selection problem. Most existing trust-based CF methods assume that underlying relationships (whether inferred or pre-existing) can be described and reasoned in a web of trust. However, in online sharing communities or e-commerce sites, a web of trust is not always available and is typically sparse. The limited and sparse web of trust strongly affects the quality of recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel method that establishes and exploits a two-faceted web of trust on the basis of users’ personal activities and relationship networks in online sharing communities or e-commerce sites, to provide enhanced-quality recommendations. The developed web of trust consists of interest similarity graphs and directed trust graphs and mitigates the sparsity of web of trust. Moreover, the proposed method captures the temporal nature of trust and interest by dynamically updating the two-faceted web of trust. Furthermore, this method adapts to the differences in user rating scales by using a modified Resnick’s prediction formula. As enabled by the Pareto principle and graph theory, new users highly benefit from the aggregated global interest similarity (popularity) in interest similarity graph and the global trust (reputation) in the directed trust graph. The experiments on two datasets with different sparsity levels (i.e., Jester and MovieLens datasets) show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the predictive accuracy and decision-support accuracy of the trust-based CF recommender system.