• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.133-150
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• 2005

Electronic Trade is dramatically changing classical international trade paradigms. In particular, under the new economic environment, the ability to utilize and Information Technologies such as Electronic Data Interchange, Web-based EDI, ebXML, web service, Internet are emerging as an important factor in deciding the competitiveness of export business. The primary purpose of this study is (1) to investigate motivation factors and performance factors of electronic trade, (2) to show the relationship between motivation factors and the level of the utilization of e-trade, (3) to reveal the relationship between the level of the utilization and performance factors of e-trade. Analysis of survey questionnaire of Korean middle and small companies indicates the following : (1) motivation factors such as cost factor, education and promotion and the search of new market, have positive effect on the level of utilization of e-trade. (2) the level of utilization of e-trade has positive effect on the performance factors such as cost factor, the search of new market, the improvement of task process.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.39-54
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• 2013

Recent explosive increase of electronic commerce provides many advantageous purchase opportunities to customers. In this situation, customers who do not have enough knowledge about their purchases, may accept product recommendations. Product recommender systems automatically reflect user's preference and provide recommendation list to the users. Thus, product recommender system in online shopping store has been known as one of the most popular tools for one-to-one marketing. However, recommender systems which do not properly reflect user's preference cause user's disappointment and waste of time. In this study, we propose a novel recommender system which uses data mining and multi-model ensemble techniques to enhance the recommendation performance through reflecting the precise user's preference. The research data is collected from the real-world online shopping store, which deals products from famous art galleries and museums in Korea. The data initially contain 5759 transaction data, but finally remain 3167 transaction data after deletion of null data. In this study, we transform the categorical variables into dummy variables and exclude outlier data. The proposed model consists of two steps. The first step predicts customers who have high likelihood to purchase products in the online shopping store. In this step, we first use logistic regression, decision trees, and artificial neural networks to predict customers who have high likelihood to purchase products in each product group. We perform above data mining techniques using SAS E-Miner software. In this study, we partition datasets into two sets as modeling and validation sets for the logistic regression and decision trees. We also partition datasets into three sets as training, test, and validation sets for the artificial neural network model. The validation dataset is equal for the all experiments. Then we composite the results of each predictor using the multi-model ensemble techniques such as bagging and bumping. Bagging is the abbreviation of "Bootstrap Aggregation" and it composite outputs from several machine learning techniques for raising the performance and stability of prediction or classification. This technique is special form of the averaging method. Bumping is the abbreviation of "Bootstrap Umbrella of Model Parameter," and it only considers the model which has the lowest error value. The results show that bumping outperforms bagging and the other predictors except for "Poster" product group. For the "Poster" product group, artificial neural network model performs better than the other models. In the second step, we use the market basket analysis to extract association rules for co-purchased products. We can extract thirty one association rules according to values of Lift, Support, and Confidence measure. We set the minimum transaction frequency to support associations as 5%, maximum number of items in an association as 4, and minimum confidence for rule generation as 10%. This study also excludes the extracted association rules below 1 of lift value. We finally get fifteen association rules by excluding duplicate rules. Among the fifteen association rules, eleven rules contain association between products in "Office Supplies" product group, one rules include the association between "Office Supplies" and "Fashion" product groups, and other three rules contain association between "Office Supplies" and "Home Decoration" product groups. Finally, the proposed product recommender systems provides list of recommendations to the proper customers. We test the usability of the proposed system by using prototype and real-world transaction and profile data. For this end, we construct the prototype system by using the ASP, Java Script and Microsoft Access. In addition, we survey about user satisfaction for the recommended product list from the proposed system and the randomly selected product lists. The participants for the survey are 173 persons who use MSN Messenger, Daum Caf$\acute{e}$, and P2P services. We evaluate the user satisfaction using five-scale Likert measure. This study also performs "Paired Sample T-test" for the results of the survey. The results show that the proposed model outperforms the random selection model with 1% statistical significance level. It means that the users satisfied the recommended product list significantly. The results also show that the proposed system may be useful in real-world online shopping store.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.85-109
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• 2018

Recommender system recommends the items expected to be purchased by a customer in the future according to his or her previous purchase behaviors. It has been served as a tool for realizing one-to-one personalization for an e-commerce service company. Traditional recommender systems, especially the recommender systems based on collaborative filtering (CF), which is the most popular recommendation algorithm in both academy and industry, are designed to generate the items list for recommendation by using 'overall rating' - a single criterion. However, it has critical limitations in understanding the customers' preferences in detail. Recently, to mitigate these limitations, some leading e-commerce companies have begun to get feedback from their customers in a form of 'multicritera ratings'. Multicriteria ratings enable the companies to understand their customers' preferences from the multidimensional viewpoints. Moreover, it is easy to handle and analyze the multidimensional ratings because they are quantitative. But, the recommendation using multicritera ratings also has limitation that it may omit detail information on a user's preference because it only considers three-to-five predetermined criteria in most cases. Under this background, this study proposes a novel hybrid recommendation system, which selectively uses the results from 'traditional CF' and 'CF using multicriteria ratings'. Our proposed system is based on the premise that some people have holistic preference scheme, whereas others have composite preference scheme. Thus, our system is designed to use traditional CF using overall rating for the users with holistic preference, and to use CF using multicriteria ratings for the users with composite preference. To validate the usefulness of the proposed system, we applied it to a real-world dataset regarding the recommendation for POI (point-of-interests). Providing personalized POI recommendation is getting more attentions as the popularity of the location-based services such as Yelp and Foursquare increases. The dataset was collected from university students via a Web-based online survey system. Using the survey system, we collected the overall ratings as well as the ratings for each criterion for 48 POIs that are located near K university in Seoul, South Korea. The criteria include 'food or taste', 'price' and 'service or mood'. As a result, we obtain 2,878 valid ratings from 112 users. Among 48 items, 38 items (80%) are used as training dataset, and the remaining 10 items (20%) are used as validation dataset. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system (i.e. hybrid selective model), we compared its performance to the performances of two comparison models - the traditional CF and the CF with multicriteria ratings. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using two metrics - average MAE(mean absolute error) and precision-in-top-N. Precision-in-top-N represents the percentage of truly high overall ratings among those that the model predicted would be the N most relevant items for each user. The experimental system was developed using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The experimental results showed that our proposed system (avg. MAE = 0.584) outperformed traditional CF (avg. MAE = 0.591) as well as multicriteria CF (avg. AVE = 0.608). We also found that multicriteria CF showed worse performance compared to traditional CF in our data set, which is contradictory to the results in the most previous studies. This result supports the premise of our study that people have two different types of preference schemes - holistic and composite. Besides MAE, the proposed system outperformed all the comparison models in precision-in-top-3, precision-in-top-5, and precision-in-top-7. The results from the paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system outperformed traditional CF with 10% statistical significance level, and multicriteria CF with 1% statistical significance level from the perspective of average MAE. The proposed system sheds light on how to understand and utilize user's preference schemes in recommender systems domain.