Abstract
Advances in Internet technologies and the proliferation of mobile devices enabled consumers to approach a wide range of goods and services, while causing an adverse effect that they have hard time reaching their congenial items even if they devote much time to searching for them. Accordingly, businesses are using the recommender systems to provide tools for consumers to find the desired items more easily. Association Rule Mining (ARM) technology is advantageous to recommender systems in that ARM provides intuitive form of a rule with interestingness measures (support, confidence, and lift) describing the relationship between items. Given an item, its relevant items can be distinguished with the help of the measures that show the strength of relationship between items. Based on the strength, the most pertinent items can be chosen among other items and exposed to a given item's web page. However, the diversity of the measures may confuse which items are more recommendable. Given two rules, for example, one rule's support and confidence may not be concurrently superior to the other rule's. Such discrepancy of the measures in distinguishing one rule's superiority from other rules may cause difficulty in selecting proper items for recommendation. In addition, in an online environment where a web page or mobile screen can provide a limited number of recommendations that attract consumer interest, the prudent selection of items to be included in the list of recommendations is very important. The exposure of items of little interest may lead consumers to ignore the recommendations. Then, such consumers will possibly not pay attention to other forms of marketing activities. Therefore, the measures should be aligned with the probability of consumer's acceptance of recommendations. For this reason, this study proposes a model-based approach to combine those measures into one unified measure that can consistently determine the ranking of recommended items. A regression model was designed to describe how well the measures (independent variables; i.e., support, confidence, and lift) explain consumer's acceptance of recommendations (dependent variables, hit rate of recommended items). The model is intuitive to understand and easy to use in that the equation consists of the commonly used measures for ARM and can be used in the estimation of hit rates. The experiment using transaction data from one of the Korea's largest online shopping malls was conducted to show that the proposed model can improve the hit rates of recommendations. From the top of the list to 13th place, recommended items in the higher rakings from the proposed model show the higher hit rates than those from the competitive model's. The result shows that the proposed model's performance is superior to the competitive model's in online recommendation environment. In a web page, consumers are provided around ten recommendations with which the proposed model outperforms. Moreover, a mobile device cannot expose many items simultaneously due to its limited screen size. Therefore, the result shows that the newly devised recommendation technique is suitable for the mobile recommender systems. While this study has been conducted to cover the cross-selling in online shopping malls that handle merchandise, the proposed method can be expected to be applied in various situations under which association rules apply. For example, this model can be applied to medical diagnostic systems that predict candidate diseases from a patient's symptoms. To increase the efficiency of the model, additional variables will need to be considered for the elaboration of the model in future studies. For example, price can be a good candidate for an explanatory variable because it has a major impact on consumer purchase decisions. If the prices of recommended items are much higher than the items in which a consumer is interested, the consumer may hesitate to accept the recommendations.
인터넷과 모바일 관련 기술의 발전과 기기의 보급은 물리적 공간의 제약을 극복하게 하고, 다양한 상품과 서비스를 소비자에게 제공함으로써, 소비자에게 선택의 폭을 넓히는 기회를 제공하는 반면, 많은 시간과 노력을 기울이고도 소비자가 자신의 기호에 적합한 품목을 선택하기 힘들어지는 부작용을 낳았다. 이에 따라, 기업은 추천 시스템을 활용하여 소비자가 원하는 품목을 더 쉽게 찾는 수단을 제공하고 있다. 상품 간의 연관성을 통계적으로 분석하는 연관 규칙 마이닝 기법은 직관적인 형태의 척도를 규칙과 함께 제공함으로써, 이로부터 도출된 규칙에 포함된 품목 간의 관계를 이해하고, 이를 추천에 적용하기 쉽다는 강점을 갖는다. 그러나, 서로 다른 규칙의 척도가 일관되게 어느 한 쪽의 규칙이 더 우위에 있음을 알려주지 못한다면, 수많은 품목 중 추천에 적합한 품목을 적절히 선별해내기 힘든 상황이 발생한다. 본 연구에서는 추천 상품의 순위를 결정할 수 있도록 연관 규칙 마이닝 기법에 회귀분석모형을 보완적으로 적용하는 방안을 제시하고자 수행되었다. 연관 규칙 마이닝에서 보편적으로 사용되고 있는 지지도, 신뢰도, 향상도를 활용하여 모형을 구현함으로써, 직관적으로 이해하기 쉬울 뿐만 아니라, 실무에서도 활용하기 쉬운 방안을 제시하고자 하였다. 국내 최대규모의 온라인 쇼핑몰의 주문 데이터를 활용한 실험을 통해, 제안된 모형으로부터 얻어진 추천 점수를 기반으로 추천상품을 결정하고, 이를 추천에 적용함으로써 추천 적중률을 향상시킬 수 있음을 보였다. 특히, 최근 모바일 상거래가 빠르게 확산됨에 따라, 제한된 화면에 한정된 수의 추천 품목을 제시해야 하는 상황에서 적합한 추천 기법임을 확인할 수 있었다.