A Study on the Improvement of Recommendation Accuracy by Using Category Association Rule Mining (카테고리 연관 규칙 마이닝을 활용한 추천 정확도 향상 기법)
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- Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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- v.26 no.2
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- pp.27-42
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- 2020
Traditional companies with offline stores were unable to secure large display space due to the problems of cost. This limitation inevitably allowed limited kinds of products to be displayed on the shelves, which resulted in consumers being deprived of the opportunity to experience various items. Taking advantage of the virtual space called the Internet, online shopping goes beyond the limits of limitations in physical space of offline shopping and is now able to display numerous products on web pages that can satisfy consumers with a variety of needs. Paradoxically, however, this can also cause consumers to experience the difficulty of comparing and evaluating too many alternatives in their purchase decision-making process. As an effort to address this side effect, various kinds of consumer's purchase decision support systems have been studied, such as keyword-based item search service and recommender systems. These systems can reduce search time for items, prevent consumer from leaving while browsing, and contribute to the seller's increased sales. Among those systems, recommender systems based on association rule mining techniques can effectively detect interrelated products from transaction data such as orders. The association between products obtained by statistical analysis provides clues to predicting how interested consumers will be in another product. However, since its algorithm is based on the number of transactions, products not sold enough so far in the early days of launch may not be included in the list of recommendations even though they are highly likely to be sold. Such missing items may not have sufficient opportunities to be exposed to consumers to record sufficient sales, and then fall into a vicious cycle of a vicious cycle of declining sales and omission in the recommendation list. This situation is an inevitable outcome in situations in which recommendations are made based on past transaction histories, rather than on determining potential future sales possibilities. This study started with the idea that reflecting the means by which this potential possibility can be identified indirectly would help to select highly recommended products. In the light of the fact that the attributes of a product affect the consumer's purchasing decisions, this study was conducted to reflect them in the recommender systems. In other words, consumers who visit a product page have shown interest in the attributes of the product and would be also interested in other products with the same attributes. On such assumption, based on these attributes, the recommender system can select recommended products that can show a higher acceptance rate. Given that a category is one of the main attributes of a product, it can be a good indicator of not only direct associations between two items but also potential associations that have yet to be revealed. Based on this idea, the study devised a recommender system that reflects not only associations between products but also categories. Through regression analysis, two kinds of associations were combined to form a model that could predict the hit rate of recommendation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, another regression model was also developed based only on associations between products. Comparative experiments were designed to be similar to the environment in which products are actually recommended in online shopping malls. First, the association rules for all possible combinations of antecedent and consequent items were generated from the order data. Then, hit rates for each of the associated rules were predicted from the support and confidence that are calculated by each of the models. The comparative experiments using order data collected from an online shopping mall show that the recommendation accuracy can be improved by further reflecting not only the association between products but also categories in the recommendation of related products. The proposed model showed a 2 to 3 percent improvement in hit rates compared to the existing model. From a practical point of view, it is expected to have a positive effect on improving consumers' purchasing satisfaction and increasing sellers' sales.
Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), which analyzes sentiment based on aspects that appear in the text, is drawing attention because it can be used in various business industries. ABSA is a study that analyzes sentiment by aspects for multiple aspects that a text has. It is being studied in various forms depending on the purpose, such as analyzing all targets or just aspects and sentiments. Here, the aspect refers to the property of a target, and the target refers to the text that causes the sentiment. For example, for restaurant reviews, you could set the aspect into food taste, food price, quality of service, mood of the restaurant, etc. Also, if there is a review that says, "The pasta was delicious, but the salad was not," the words "steak" and "salad," which are directly mentioned in the sentence, become the "target." So far, in ABSA, most studies have analyzed sentiment only based on aspects or targets. However, even with the same aspects or targets, sentiment analysis may be inaccurate. Instances would be when aspects or sentiment are divided or when sentiment exists without a target. For example, sentences like, "Pizza and the salad were good, but the steak was disappointing." Although the aspect of this sentence is limited to "food," conflicting sentiments coexist. In addition, in the case of sentences such as "Shrimp was delicious, but the price was extravagant," although the target here is "shrimp," there are opposite sentiments coexisting that are dependent on the aspect. Finally, in sentences like "The food arrived too late and is cold now." there is no target (NULL), but it transmits a negative sentiment toward the aspect "service." Like this, failure to consider both aspects and targets - when sentiment or aspect is divided or when sentiment exists without a target - creates a dual dependency problem. To address this problem, this research analyzes sentiment by considering both aspects and targets (Target-Aspect-Sentiment Detection, hereby TASD). This study detected the limitations of existing research in the field of TASD: local contexts are not fully captured, and the number of epochs and batch size dramatically lowers the F1-score. The current model excels in spotting overall context and relations between each word. However, it struggles with phrases in the local context and is relatively slow when learning. Therefore, this study tries to improve the model's performance. To achieve the objective of this research, we additionally used auxiliary loss in aspect-sentiment classification by constructing CNN(Convolutional Neural Network) layers parallel to existing models. If existing models have analyzed aspect-sentiment through BERT encoding, Pooler, and Linear layers, this research added CNN layer-adaptive average pooling to existing models, and learning was progressed by adding additional loss values for aspect-sentiment to existing loss. In other words, when learning, the auxiliary loss, computed through CNN layers, allowed the local context to be captured more fitted. After learning, the model is designed to do aspect-sentiment analysis through the existing method. To evaluate the performance of this model, two datasets, SemEval-2015 task 12 and SemEval-2016 task 5, were used and the f1-score increased compared to the existing models. When the batch was 8 and epoch was 5, the difference was largest between the F1-score of existing models and this study with 29 and 45, respectively. Even when batch and epoch were adjusted, the F1-scores were higher than the existing models. It can be said that even when the batch and epoch numbers were small, they can be learned effectively compared to the existing models. Therefore, it can be useful in situations where resources are limited. Through this study, aspect-based sentiments can be more accurately analyzed. Through various uses in business, such as development or establishing marketing strategies, both consumers and sellers will be able to make efficient decisions. In addition, it is believed that the model can be fully learned and utilized by small businesses, those that do not have much data, given that they use a pre-training model and recorded a relatively high F1-score even with limited resources.
Korea has stepped up efforts to investigate and catalog its flora and fauna to conserve the biodiversity of the Korean Peninsula and secure biological resources since the ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1992 and the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits (ABS) in 2010. Thus, after its establishment in 2007, the National Institute of Biological Resources (NIBR) of the Ministry of Environment of Korea initiated a project called the Korean Indigenous Species Investigation Project to investigate indigenous species on the Korean Peninsula. For 15 years since its beginning in 2006, this project has been carried out in five phases, Phase 1 from 2006-2008, Phase 2 from 2009-2011, Phase 3 from 2012-2014, Phase 4 from 2015-2017, and Phase 5 from 2018-2020. Before this project, in 2006, the number of indigenous species surveyed was 29,916. The figure was cumulatively aggregated at the end of each phase as 33,253 species for Phase 1 (2008), 38,011 species for Phase 2 (2011), 42,756 species for Phase 3 (2014), 49,027 species for Phase 4 (2017), and 54,428 species for Phase 5(2020). The number of indigenous species surveyed grew rapidly, showing an approximately 1.8-fold increase as the project progressed. These statistics showed an annual average of 2,320 newly recorded species during the project period. Among the recorded species, a total of 5,242 new species were reported in scientific publications, a great scientific achievement. During this project period, newly recorded species on the Korean Peninsula were identified using the recent taxonomic classifications as follows: 4,440 insect species (including 988 new species), 4,333 invertebrate species except for insects (including 1,492 new species), 98 vertebrate species (fish) (including nine new species), 309 plant species (including 176 vascular plant species, 133 bryophyte species, and 39 new species), 1,916 algae species (including 178 new species), 1,716 fungi and lichen species(including 309 new species), and 4,812 prokaryotic species (including 2,226 new species). The number of collected biological specimens in each phase was aggregated as follows: 247,226 for Phase 1 (2008), 207,827 for Phase 2 (2011), 287,133 for Phase 3 (2014), 244,920 for Phase 4(2017), and 144,333 for Phase 5(2020). A total of 1,131,439 specimens were obtained with an annual average of 75,429. More specifically, 281,054 insect specimens, 194,667 invertebrate specimens (except for insects), 40,100 fish specimens, 378,251 plant specimens, 140,490 algae specimens, 61,695 fungi specimens, and 35,182 prokaryotic specimens were collected. The cumulative number of researchers, which were nearly all professional taxonomists and graduate students majoring in taxonomy across the country, involved in this project was around 5,000, with an annual average of 395. The number of researchers/assistant researchers or mainly graduate students participating in Phase 1 was 597/268; 522/191 in Phase 2; 939/292 in Phase 3; 575/852 in Phase 4; and 601/1,097 in Phase 5. During this project period, 3,488 papers were published in major scientific journals. Of these, 2,320 papers were published in domestic journals and 1,168 papers were published in Science Citation Index(SCI) journals. During the project period, a total of 83.3 billion won (annual average of 5.5 billion won) or approximately US $75 million (annual average of US $5 million) was invested in investigating indigenous species and collecting specimens. This project was a large-scale research study led by the Korean government. It is considered to be a successful example of Korea's compressed development as it attracted almost all of the taxonomists in Korea and made remarkable achievements with a massive budget in a short time. The results from this project led to the National List of Species of Korea, where all species were organized by taxonomic classification. Information regarding the National List of Species of Korea is available to experts, students, and the general public (https://species.nibr.go.kr/index.do). The information, including descriptions, DNA sequences, habitats, distributions, ecological aspects, images, and multimedia, has been digitized, making contributions to scientific advancement in research fields such as phylogenetics and evolution. The species information also serves as a basis for projects aimed at species distribution and biological monitoring such as climate-sensitive biological indicator species. Moreover, the species information helps bio-industries search for useful biological resources. The most meaningful achievement of this project can be in providing support for nurturing young taxonomists like graduate students. This project has continued for the past 15 years and is still ongoing. Efforts to address issues, including species misidentification and invalid synonyms, still have to be made to enhance taxonomic research. Research needs to be conducted to investigate another 50,000 species out of the estimated 100,000 indigenous species on the Korean Peninsula.
Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) is one class of the powerful Deep Neural Network that can analyze and learn hierarchies of visual features. Originally, first neural network (Neocognitron) was introduced in the 80s. At that time, the neural network was not broadly used in both industry and academic field by cause of large-scale dataset shortage and low computational power. However, after a few decades later in 2012, Krizhevsky made a breakthrough on ILSVRC-12 visual recognition competition using Convolutional Neural Network. That breakthrough revived people interest in the neural network. The success of Convolutional Neural Network is achieved with two main factors. First of them is the emergence of advanced hardware (GPUs) for sufficient parallel computation. Second is the availability of large-scale datasets such as ImageNet (ILSVRC) dataset for training. Unfortunately, many new domains are bottlenecked by these factors. For most domains, it is difficult and requires lots of effort to gather large-scale dataset to train a ConvNet. Moreover, even if we have a large-scale dataset, training ConvNet from scratch is required expensive resource and time-consuming. These two obstacles can be solved by using transfer learning. Transfer learning is a method for transferring the knowledge from a source domain to new domain. There are two major Transfer learning cases. First one is ConvNet as fixed feature extractor, and the second one is Fine-tune the ConvNet on a new dataset. In the first case, using pre-trained ConvNet (such as on ImageNet) to compute feed-forward activations of the image into the ConvNet and extract activation features from specific layers. In the second case, replacing and retraining the ConvNet classifier on the new dataset, then fine-tune the weights of the pre-trained network with the backpropagation. In this paper, we focus on using multiple ConvNet layers as a fixed feature extractor only. However, applying features with high dimensional complexity that is directly extracted from multiple ConvNet layers is still a challenging problem. We observe that features extracted from multiple ConvNet layers address the different characteristics of the image which means better representation could be obtained by finding the optimal combination of multiple ConvNet layers. Based on that observation, we propose to employ multiple ConvNet layer representations for transfer learning instead of a single ConvNet layer representation. Overall, our primary pipeline has three steps. Firstly, images from target task are given as input to ConvNet, then that image will be feed-forwarded into pre-trained AlexNet, and the activation features from three fully connected convolutional layers are extracted. Secondly, activation features of three ConvNet layers are concatenated to obtain multiple ConvNet layers representation because it will gain more information about an image. When three fully connected layer features concatenated, the occurring image representation would have 9192 (4096+4096+1000) dimension features. However, features extracted from multiple ConvNet layers are redundant and noisy since they are extracted from the same ConvNet. Thus, a third step, we will use Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to select salient features before the training phase. When salient features are obtained, the classifier can classify image more accurately, and the performance of transfer learning can be improved. To evaluate proposed method, experiments are conducted in three standard datasets (Caltech-256, VOC07, and SUN397) to compare multiple ConvNet layer representations against single ConvNet layer representation by using PCA for feature selection and dimension reduction. Our experiments demonstrated the importance of feature selection for multiple ConvNet layer representation. Moreover, our proposed approach achieved 75.6% accuracy compared to 73.9% accuracy achieved by FC7 layer on the Caltech-256 dataset, 73.1% accuracy compared to 69.2% accuracy achieved by FC8 layer on the VOC07 dataset, 52.2% accuracy compared to 48.7% accuracy achieved by FC7 layer on the SUN397 dataset. We also showed that our proposed approach achieved superior performance, 2.8%, 2.1% and 3.1% accuracy improvement on Caltech-256, VOC07, and SUN397 dataset respectively compare to existing work.
Trust has been studied extensively in psychology, economics, and sociology, and its importance has been emphasized not only in marketing, but also in business disciplines in general. Unlike past relationships between suppliers and buyers, which take considerable advantage of private networks and may involve unethical business practices, partnerships between suppliers and buyers are at the core of success for industrial marketing amid intense global competition in the 21st century. A high level of mutual cooperation occurs through an exchange relationship based on trust, which brings long-term benefits, competitive enhancements, and transaction cost reductions, among other benefits, for both buyers and suppliers. In spite of the important role of trust, existing studies in buy-supply situations overlook the role of trust and do not systematically analyze the effect of trust on relational performance. Consequently, an in-depth study that determines the relation of trust to the relational performance between buyers and suppliers of business services is absolutely needed. Business services in this study, which include those supporting the manufacturing industry, are drawing attention as the economic growth engine for the next generation. The Korean government has selected business services as a strategic area for the development of manufacturing sectors. Since the demands for opening business services markets are becoming fiercer, the competitiveness of the business service industry must be promoted now more than ever. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the mutual trust between buyers and suppliers on relational performance. Specifically, this study proposed a theoretical model of trust-relational performance in the transactions of business services and empirically tested the hypotheses delineated from the framework. The study suggests strategic implications based on research findings. Empirical data were collected via multiple methods, including via telephone, mail, and in-person interviews. Sample companies were knowledge-based companies supplying and purchasing business services in Korea. The present study collected data on a dyadic basis. Each pair of sample companies includes a buying company and its corresponding supplying company. Mutual trust was traced for each pair of companies. This study proposes a model of trust-relational performance of buying-supplying for business services. The model consists of trust and its antecedents and consequences. The trust of buyers is classified into trust toward the supplying company and trust toward salespersons. Viewing trust both at the individual level and the organizational level is based on the research of Doney and Cannon (1997). Normally, buyers are the subject of trust, but this study supposes that suppliers are the subjects. Hence, it uniquely focused on the bilateral perspective of perceived risk. In other words, suppliers, like buyers, are the subject of trust since transactions are normally bilateral. From this point of view, suppliers' trust in buyers is as important as buyers' trust in suppliers. The suppliers' trust is influenced by the extent to which it trusts the buying companies and the buyers. This classification of trust using an individual level and an organization level is based on the suggestion of Doney and Cannon (1997). Trust affects the process of supplier selection, which works in a bilateral manner. Suppliers are actively involved in the supplier selection process, working very closely with buyers. In addition, the process is affected by the extent to which each party trusts its partners. The selection process consists of certain steps: recognition, information search, supplier selection, and performance evaluation. As a result of the process, both buyers and suppliers evaluate the performance and take corrective actions on the basis of such outcomes as tangible, intangible, and/or side effects. The measurement of trust used for the present study was developed on the basis of the studies of Mayer, Davis and Schoorman (1995) and Mayer and Davis (1999). Based on their recommendations, the three dimensions of trust used for the study include ability, benevolence, and integrity. The original questions were adjusted to the context of the transactions of business services. For example, a question such as "He/she has professional capabilities" has been changed to "The salesperson showed professional capabilities while we talked about our products." The measurement used for this study differs from those used in previous studies (Rotter 1967; Sullivan and Peterson 1982; Dwyer and Oh 1987). The measurements of the antecedents and consequences of trust used for this study were developed on the basis of Doney and Cannon (1997). The original questions were adjusted to the context of transactions in business services. In particular, questions were developed for both buyers and suppliers to address the following factors: reputation (integrity, customer care, good-will), market standing (company size, market share, positioning in the industry), willingness to customize (product, process, delivery), information sharing (proprietary information, private information), willingness to maintain relationships, perceived professionalism, authority empowerment, buyer-seller similarity, and contact frequency. As a consequential variable of trust, relational performance was measured. Relational performance is classified into tangible effects, intangible effects, and side effects. Tangible effects include financial performance; intangible effects include improvements in relations, network developing, and internal employee satisfaction; side effects include those not included either in the tangible or intangible effects. Three hundred fifty pairs of companies were contacted, and one hundred five pairs of companies responded. After deleting five company pairs because of incomplete responses, one hundred five pairs of companies were used for data analysis. The response ratio of the companies used for data analysis is 30% (105/350), which is above the average response ratio in industrial marketing research. As for the characteristics of the respondent companies, the majority of the companies operate service businesses for both buyers (85.4%) and suppliers (81.8%). The majority of buyers (76%) deal with consumer goods, while the majority of suppliers (70%) deal with industrial goods. This may imply that buyers process the incoming material, parts, and components to produce the finished consumer goods. As indicated by their report of the length of acquaintance with their partners, suppliers appear to have longer business relationships than do buyers. Hypothesis 1 tested the effects of buyer-supplier characteristics on trust. The salesperson's professionalism (t=2.070, p<0.05) and authority empowerment (t=2.328, p<0.05) positively affected buyers' trust toward suppliers. On the other hand, authority empowerment (t=2.192, p<0.05) positively affected supplier trust toward buyers. For both buyers and suppliers, the degree of authority empowerment plays a crucial role in the maintenance of their trust in each other. Hypothesis 2 tested the effects of buyerseller relational characteristics on trust. Buyers tend to trust suppliers, as suppliers make every effort to contact buyers (t=2.212, p<0.05). This tendency has also been shown to be much stronger for suppliers (t=2.591, p<0.01). On the other hand suppliers trust buyers because suppliers perceive buyers as being similar to themselves (t=2.702, p<0.01). This finding confirmed the results of Crosby, Evans, and Cowles (1990), which reported that suppliers and buyers build relationships through regular meetings, either for business or personal matters. Hypothesis 3 tested the effects of trust on perceived risk. It has been found that for both suppliers and buyers the lower is the trust, the higher is the perceived risk (t=-6.621, p<0.01 for buyers; t=-2.437, p<0.05). Interestingly, this tendency has been shown to be much stronger for buyers than for suppliers. One possible explanation for this higher level of perceived risk is that buyers normally perceive higher risks than do suppliers in transactions involving business services. For this reason, it is necessary for suppliers to implement risk reduction strategies for buyers. Hypothesis 4 tested the effects of trust on information searching. It has been found that for both suppliers and buyers, contrary to expectation, trust depends on their partner's reputation (t=2.929, p<0.01 for buyers; t=2.711, p<0.05 for suppliers). This finding shows that suppliers with good reputations tend to be trusted. Prior experience did not show any significant relationship with trust for either buyers or suppliers. Hypothesis 5 tested the effects of trust on supplier/buyer selection. Unlike buyers, suppliers tend to trust buyers when they think that previous transactions with buyers were important (t=2.913 p<0.01). However, this study did not show any significant relationship between source loyalty and the trust of buyers in suppliers. Hypothesis 6 tested the effects of trust on relational performances. For buyers and suppliers, financial performance reportedly improved when they trusted their partners (t=2.301, p<0.05 for buyers; t=3.692, p<0.01 for suppliers). It is interesting that this tendency was much stronger for suppliers than it was for buyers. Similarly, competitiveness was reported to improve when buyers and suppliers trusted their partners (t=3.563, p<0.01 for buyers; t=3.042, p<0.01 for suppliers). For suppliers, efficiency and productivity were reportedly improved when they trusted buyers (t=2.673, p<0.01). Other performance indices showed insignificant relationships with trust. The findings of this study have some strategic implications. First and most importantly, trust-based transactions are beneficial for both suppliers and buyers. As verified in the study, financial performance can be improved through efforts to build and maintain mutual trust. Similarly, competitiveness can be increased through the same kinds of effort. Second, trust-based transactions can facilitate the reduction of perceived risks inherent in the purchasing situation. This finding has implications for both suppliers and buyers. It is generally believed that buyers perceive higher risks in a highly involved purchasing situation. To reduce risks, previous studies have recommended that suppliers devise risk-reducing tactics. Moving beyond these recommendations, the present study uniquely focused on the bilateral perspective of perceived risk. In other words, suppliers are also susceptible to perceived risks, especially when they supply services that require very technical and sophisticated manipulations and maintenance. Consequently, buyers and suppliers must solve problems together in close collaboration. Hence, mutual trust plays a crucial role in the problem-solving process. Third, as found in this study, the more authority a salesperson has, the more he or she can be trusted. This finding is very important with regard to tactics. Building trust is a long-term assignment; however, when mutual trust has not been developed, suppliers can overcome the problems they encounter by empowering a salesperson with the authority to make certain decisions. This finding applies to suppliers as well.