A New Item Recommendation Procedure Using Preference Boundary

Lately, in consumers' markets the number of new items is rapidly increasing at an overwhelming rate while consumers have limited access to information about those new products in making a sensible, well-informed purchase. Therefore, item providers and customers need a system which recommends right items to right customers. Also, whenever new items are released, for instance, the recommender system specializing in new items can help item providers locate and identify potential customers. Currently, new items are being added to an existing system without being specially noted to consumers, making it difficult for consumers to identify and evaluate new products introduced in the markets. Most of previous approaches for recommender systems have to rely on the usage history of customers. For new items, this content-based (CB) approach is simply not available for the system to recommend those new items to potential consumers. Although collaborative filtering (CF) approach is not directly applicable to solve the new item problem, it would be a good idea to use the basic principle of CF which identifies similar customers, i,e. neighbors, and recommend items to those customers who have liked the similar items in the past. This research aims to suggest a hybrid recommendation procedure based on the preference boundary of target customer. We suggest the hybrid recommendation procedure using the preference boundary in the feature space for recommending new items only. The basic principle is that if a new item belongs within the preference boundary of a target customer, then it is evaluated to be preferred by the customer. Customers' preferences and characteristics of items including new items are represented in a feature space, and the scope or boundary of the target customer's preference is extended to those of neighbors'. The new item recommendation procedure consists of three steps. The first step is analyzing the profile of items, which are represented as k-dimensional feature values. The second step is to determine the representative point of the target customer's preference boundary, the centroid, based on a personal information set. To determine the centroid of preference boundary of a target customer, three algorithms are developed in this research: one is using the centroid of a target customer only (TC), the other is using centroid of a (dummy) big target customer that is composed of a target customer and his/her neighbors (BC), and another is using centroids of a target customer and his/her neighbors (NC). The third step is to determine the range of the preference boundary, the radius. The suggested algorithm Is using the average distance (AD) between the centroid and all purchased items. We test whether the CF-based approach to determine the centroid of the preference boundary improves the recommendation quality or not. For this purpose, we develop two hybrid algorithms, BC and NC, which use neighbors when deciding centroid of the preference boundary. To test the validity of hybrid algorithms, BC and NC, we developed CB-algorithm, TC, which uses target customers only. We measured effectiveness scores of suggested algorithms and compared them through a series of experiments with a set of real mobile image transaction data. We spilt the period between 1st June 2004 and 31st July and the period between 1st August and 31st August 2004 as a training set and a test set, respectively. The training set Is used to make the preference boundary, and the test set is used to evaluate the performance of the suggested hybrid recommendation procedure. The main aim of this research Is to compare the hybrid recommendation algorithm with the CB algorithm. To evaluate the performance of each algorithm, we compare the purchased new item list in test period with the recommended item list which is recommended by suggested algorithms. So we employ the evaluation metric to hit the ratio for evaluating our algorithms. The hit ratio is defined as the ratio of the hit set size to the recommended set size. The hit set size means the number of success of recommendations in our experiment, and the test set size means the number of purchased items during the test period. Experimental test result shows the hit ratio of BC and NC is bigger than that of TC. This means using neighbors Is more effective to recommend new items. That is hybrid algorithm using CF is more effective when recommending to consumers new items than the algorithm using only CB. The reason of the smaller hit ratio of BC than that of NC is that BC is defined as a dummy or virtual customer who purchased all items of target customers' and neighbors'. That is centroid of BC often shifts from that of TC, so it tends to reflect skewed characters of target customer. So the recommendation algorithm using NC shows the best hit ratio, because NC has sufficient information about target customers and their neighbors without damaging the information about the target customers.