Collaborative filtering recommendation based on trust and emotion

On Producing Accurate Rating Predictions in Sparse Collaborative Filtering Datasets

The typical goal of a collaborative filtering algorithm is the minimisation of the deviation between rating predictions and factual user ratings so that the recommender system offers suggestions for appropriate items, achieving a higher prediction value. The datasets on which collaborative filtering algorithms are applied vary in terms of sparsity, i.e., regarding the percentage of empty cells in the user–item rating matrices. Sparsity is an important factor affecting rating prediction accuracy, since research has proven that collaborative filtering over sparse datasets exhibits a lower accuracy. The present work aims to explore, in a broader context, the factors related to rating prediction accuracy in sparse collaborative filtering datasets, indicating that recommending the items that simply achieve higher prediction values than others, without considering other factors, in some cases, can reduce recommendation accuracy and negatively affect the recommender system’s success. An extensive evaluation is conducted using sparse collaborative filtering datasets. It is found that the number of near neighbours used for the prediction formulation, the rating average of the user for whom the prediction is generated and the rating average of the item concerning the prediction can indicate, in many cases, whether the rating prediction produced is reliable or not.

A New Method Combining Pattern Prediction and Preference Prediction for Next Basket Recommendation

Market basket prediction, which is the basis of product recommendation systems, is the concept of predicting what customers will buy in the next shopping basket based on analysis of their historical shopping records. Although product recommendation systems develop rapidly and have good performance in practice, state-of-the-art algorithms still have plenty of room for improvement. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm combining pattern prediction and preference prediction. In pattern prediction, sequential rules, periodic patterns and association rules are mined and probability models are established based on their statistical characteristics, e.g., the distribution of periods of a periodic pattern, to make a more precise prediction. Products that have a higher probability will have priority to be recommended. If the quantity of recommended products is insufficient, then we make a preference prediction to select more products. Preference prediction is based on the frequency and tendency of products that appear in customers’ individual shopping records, where tendency is a new concept to reflect the evolution of customers’ shopping preferences. Experiments show that our algorithm outperforms those of the baseline methods and state-of-the-art methods on three of four real-world transaction sequence datasets.

NLP-Based Customer Loyalty Improvement Recommender System (CLIRS2)

Structured data on customer feedback is becoming more costly and timely to collect and organize. On the other hand, unstructured opinionated data, e.g., in the form of free-text comments, is proliferating and available on public websites, such as social media websites, blogs, forums, and websites that provide recommendations. This research proposes a novel method to develop a knowledge-based recommender system from unstructured (text) data. The method is based on applying an opinion mining algorithm, extracting aspect-based sentiment score per text item, and transforming text into a structured form. An action rule mining algorithm is applied to the data table constructed from sentiment mining. The proposed application of the method is the problem of improving customer satisfaction ratings. The results obtained from the dataset of customer comments related to the repair services were evaluated with accuracy and coverage. Further, the results were incorporated into the framework of a web-based user-friendly recommender system to advise the business on how to maximally increase their profits by introducing minimal sets of changes in their service. Experiments and evaluation results from comparing the structured data-based version of the system CLIRS (Customer Loyalty Improvement Recommender System) with the unstructured data-based version of the system (CLIRS2) are provided.

A Recommendation Model Based on Multi-Emotion Similarity in the Social Networks

This paper proposed a recommendation model called RM-SA, which is based on multi-emotional analysis in networks. In the RM-MES scheme, the recommendation values of goods are primarily derived from the probabilities calculated by a similar existing recommendation system during the initiation stage of the recommendation system. First, the behaviors of those users can be divided into three aspects, including browsing goods, buying goods only, and purchasing–evaluating goods. Then, the characteristics of goods and the emotional information of user are considered to determine similarities between users and stores. We chose the most similar shop as the reference existing shop in the experiment. Then, the recommendation probability matrix of both the existing store and the new store is computed based on the similarities between users and target user, who are randomly selected. Finally, we used co-purchasing metadata from Amazon and a certain kind of comments to verify the effectiveness and performance of the RM-MES scheme proposed in this paper through comprehensive experiments. The final results showed that the precision, recall, and F1-measure were increased by 19.07%, 20.73% and 21.02% respectively.