• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.129-142
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• 2019

The interest in the blockchain technology has been increasing since its inception and it has been applied to many fields and sectors. The blockchain technology creates a decentralized environment where no third party controls the data and transaction. Mobile apps recommendation has been extensively used to recommend apps to mobile users. For example, Android-based recommendation applications have been developed to recommend other mobile apps for download depending on user's preferences and mobile context. These recommendations help users discover apps by referring to the experiences of other users. Due to the collection of a large amount of data and user information, there is a problem of insecurity and user's privacy that are prone to be attacked. To address this issue the blockchain technology can be incorporated to assure cryptographic safety. In this paper, we present a survey of the on-going mobile app recommendations and e-commerce technology trend to address how the blockchain can be incorporated into the collaborative filtering recommendation systems to enable the users to set up a secured data, which implies the importance of user privacy preference on personalized app recommendations.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.467-477
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• 2004

While recommender systems were used by a few E-commerce sites former days, they are now becoming serious business tools that are re-shaping the world of I-commerce. And collaborative filtering has been a very successful recommendation technique in both research and practice. But there are two problems in personalized recommender systems, it is First-Rating problem and Sparsity problem. In this paper, we solve these problems using the associative relation clustering and “Lift” of association rules. We produce “Lift” between items using user's rating data. And we apply Threshold by -cut to the association between items. To make an efficiency of associative relation cluster higher, we use not only the existing Hypergraph Clique Clustering algorithm but also the suggested Split Cluster method. If the cluster is completed, we calculate a similarity iten in each inner cluster. And the index is saved in the database for the fast access. We apply the creating index to predict the preference for new items. To estimate the Performance, the suggested method is compared with existing collaborative filtering techniques. As a result, the proposed method is efficient for improving the accuracy of prediction through solving problems of existing collaborative filtering techniques.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.7-11
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• 2013

Taking experts' knowledge to recommend items has shown some promising results in recommender system research. In order to improve the performance of the existing recommendation algorithms, previous researches on expert-based recommender systems have exploited the knowledge of a common expert group for all users. In this paper, we study a problem of identifying personalized experts within a user group, assuming each user needs different kinds and levels of expert help. To demonstrate this idea, we present a framework for using Support Vector Machine (SVM) to find varying expert groups for users; it is shown in an experiment that the proposed SVM approach can identify personalized experts, and that the person-alized expert-based collaborative filtering (CF) can yield better results than k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) algorithm.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.1129-1139
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• 2006

Pearson's correlation coefficient and vector similarity are generally applied to The users' similarity weight of user based recommender system. This study is needed to find that the correlation coefficient of similarity weight is effected by the number of pair response and significance probability. From the classified correlation coefficient by the significance probability test on the correlation coefficient and pair of response, the change of MAE is studied by comparing the predicted precision of the two. The results are experimentally related with the change of MAE from the significant correlation coefficient and the number of pair response.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.609-616
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• 2016

This paper is proposed a customized market analysis method using SVM and collaborative filtering. The proposed customized market analysis scheme is consists of DC(Data Classification) module, ICF(Improved Collaborative Filtering) module, and CMA(Customized Market Analysis) module. DC module classifies the characteristics of on-line and off-line shopping mall and traditional markets into price, quality, and quantity using SVM. ICF module calculates the similarity by adding age weight and job weight, and generates network using the similarity of purchased item each users, and makes a recommendation list of neighbor nodes. And CMA module provides the result of customized market analysis using the data classification result of DC module and the recommendation list of ICF module. As a result of comparing the proposed customized recommendation list with the existing user based recommendation list, the case of recommendation list using the existing collaborative filtering scheme, precision is 0.53, recall is 0.56, and F-measure is 0.57. But the case of proposed customized recommendation list, precision is 0.78, recall is 0.85, and F-measure is 0.81. That is, the proposed customized recommendation list shows more precision.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.43-56
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• 2020

Recommender systems help users make the best choice among various options. Especially, recommender systems play important roles in internet sites as digital information is generated innumerable every second. Many studies on recommender systems have focused on an accurate recommendation. However, there are some problems to overcome in order for the recommendation system to be commercially successful. First, there is a lack of transparency in the recommender system. That is, users cannot know why products are recommended. Second, the recommender system cannot immediately reflect changes in user preferences. That is, although the preference of the user's product changes over time, the recommender system must rebuild the model to reflect the user's preference. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a recommendation methodology using topic modeling and sequential association rule mining to solve these problems from review data. Product reviews provide useful information for recommendations because product reviews include not only rating of the product but also various contents such as user experiences and emotional state. So, reviews imply user preference for the product. So, topic modeling is useful for explaining why items are recommended to users. In addition, sequential association rule mining is useful for identifying changes in user preferences. The proposed methodology is largely divided into two phases. The first phase is to create user profile based on topic modeling. After extracting topics from user reviews on products, user profile on topics is created. The second phase is to recommend products using sequential rules that appear in buying behaviors of users as time passes. The buying behaviors are derived from a change in the topic of each user. A collaborative filtering-based recommendation system was developed as a benchmark system, and we compared the performance of the proposed methodology with that of the collaborative filtering-based recommendation system using Amazon's review dataset. As evaluation metrics, accuracy, recall, precision, and F1 were used. For topic modeling, collapsed Gibbs sampling was conducted. And we extracted 15 topics. Looking at the main topics, topic 1, top 3, topic 4, topic 7, topic 9, topic 13, topic 14 are related to "comedy shows", "high-teen drama series", "crime investigation drama", "horror theme", "British drama", "medical drama", "science fiction drama", respectively. As a result of comparative analysis, the proposed methodology outperformed the collaborative filtering-based recommendation system. From the results, we found that the time just prior to the recommendation was very important for inferring changes in user preference. Therefore, the proposed methodology not only can secure the transparency of the recommender system but also can reflect the user's preferences that change over time. However, the proposed methodology has some limitations. The proposed methodology cannot recommend product elaborately if the number of products included in the topic is large. In addition, the number of sequential patterns is small because the number of topics is too small. Therefore, future research needs to consider these limitations.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.83-89
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• 2022

As a representative technique of recommender systems, collaborative filtering has been successfully in service through many commercial and academic systems. This technique recommends items highly rated by similar neighbor users, based on similarity of ratings on common items rated by two users. Recently research on time-aware recommender systems has been conducted, which attempts to improve system performance by reflecting user rating time of items. However, the decay rate uniform to past ratings has a risk of lowering the rating prediction performance of the system. This study proposes a rating time-aware similarity measure between users, which is a novel approach different from previous ones. The proposed approach considers changes of similarity value over time, not item rating time. In order to evaluate performance of the proposed method, experiments using various parameter values and types of time change functions are conducted, resulting in improving prediction accuracy of existing traditional similarity measures significantly.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.462-472
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• 2021

With an increase in the scale of recommender systems, users' rating data tend to be extremely sparse. Some methods have been utilized to alleviate this problem; nevertheless, it has not been satisfactorily solved yet. Therefore, we propose an effective pre-rating method based on users' dichotomous preferences and average ratings fusion. First, based on a user-item ratings matrix, a new user-item preference matrix was constructed to analyze and model user preferences. The items were then divided into two categories based on a parameterized dynamic threshold. The missing ratings for items that the user was not interested in were directly filled with the lowest user rating; otherwise, fusion ratings were utilized to fill the missing ratings. Further, an optimized parameter λ was introduced to adjust their weights. Finally, we verified our method on a standard dataset. The experimental results show that our method can effectively reduce the prediction error and improve the recommendation quality. As for its application, our method is effective, but not complicated.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.1-18
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• 2015

Collaborative filtering(CF) algorithm has been popularly used for recommender systems in both academic and practical applications. A general CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and creates recommendation results with the items favored by other people with similar tastes. Thus, it is very important for CF to measure the similarities between users because the recommendation quality depends on it. In most cases, users' explicit numeric ratings of items(i.e. quantitative information) have only been used to calculate the similarities between users in CF. However, several studies indicated that qualitative information such as user's reviews on the items may contribute to measure these similarities more accurately. Considering that a lot of people are likely to share their honest opinion on the items they purchased recently due to the advent of the Web 2.0, user's reviews can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, this study proposes a new hybrid recommender system that combines with users' review mining. Our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and his/her text reviews on the items when calculating similarities between users. In specific, our system creates not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-item review term matrix. Then, it calculates rating similarity and review similarity from each matrix, and calculates the final user-to-user similarity based on these two similarities(i.e. rating and review similarities). As the methods for calculating review similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is to use the frequency of the commonly used terms, and the other one is to use the sum of the importance weights of the commonly used terms in users' review. In the case of the importance weights of terms, we proposed the use of average TF-IDF(Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency) weights. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we applied it to the implementation of a recommender system for smartphone applications (hereafter, app). At present, over a million apps are offered in each app stores operated by Google and Apple. Due to this information overload, users have difficulty in selecting proper apps that they really want. Furthermore, app store operators like Google and Apple have cumulated huge amount of users' reviews on apps until now. Thus, we chose smartphone app stores as the application domain of our system. In order to collect the experimental data set, we built and operated a Web-based data collection system for about two weeks. As a result, we could obtain 1,246 valid responses(ratings and reviews) from 78 users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications(VBA) and SAS Text Miner. And, to avoid distortion due to human intervention, we did not adopt any refining works by human during the user's review mining process. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared its performance to the performance of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using average MAE(mean absolute error). The experimental results showed that our proposed system(MAE = 0.7867 ~ 0.7881) slightly outperformed a conventional CF system(MAE = 0.7939). Also, they showed that the calculation of review similarity between users based on the TF-IDF weights(MAE = 0.7867) leaded to better recommendation accuracy than the calculation based on the frequency of the commonly used terms in reviews(MAE = 0.7881). The results from paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system with review similarity calculation using the frequency of the commonly used terms outperformed conventional CF system with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of users' review information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.19-38
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• 2017

Collaborative filtering (CF) algorithm has been popularly used for implementing recommender systems. Until now, there have been many prior studies to improve the accuracy of CF. Among them, some recent studies adopt 'hybrid recommendation approach', which enhances the performance of conventional CF by using additional information. In this research, we propose a new hybrid recommender system which fuses CF and the results from the social network analysis on trust and distrust relationship networks among users to enhance prediction accuracy. The proposed algorithm of our study is based on memory-based CF. But, when calculating the similarity between users in CF, our proposed algorithm considers not only the correlation of the users' numeric rating patterns, but also the users' in-degree centrality values derived from trust and distrust relationship networks. In specific, it is designed to amplify the similarity between a target user and his or her neighbor when the neighbor has higher in-degree centrality in the trust relationship network. Also, it attenuates the similarity between a target user and his or her neighbor when the neighbor has higher in-degree centrality in the distrust relationship network. Our proposed algorithm considers four (4) types of user relationships - direct trust, indirect trust, direct distrust, and indirect distrust - in total. And, it uses four adjusting coefficients, which adjusts the level of amplification / attenuation for in-degree centrality values derived from direct / indirect trust and distrust relationship networks. To determine optimal adjusting coefficients, genetic algorithms (GA) has been adopted. Under this background, we named our proposed algorithm as SNACF-GA (Social Network Analysis - based CF using GA). To validate the performance of the SNACF-GA, we used a real-world data set which is called 'Extended Epinions dataset' provided by 'trustlet.org'. It is the data set contains user responses (rating scores and reviews) after purchasing specific items (e.g. car, movie, music, book) as well as trust / distrust relationship information indicating whom to trust or distrust between users. The experimental system was basically developed using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but we also used UCINET 6 for calculating the in-degree centrality of trust / distrust relationship networks. In addition, we used Palisade Software's Evolver, which is a commercial software implements genetic algorithm. To examine the effectiveness of our proposed system more precisely, we adopted two comparison models. The first comparison model is conventional CF. It only uses users' explicit numeric ratings when calculating the similarities between users. That is, it does not consider trust / distrust relationship between users at all. The second comparison model is SNACF (Social Network Analysis - based CF). SNACF differs from the proposed algorithm SNACF-GA in that it considers only direct trust / distrust relationships. It also does not use GA optimization. The performances of the proposed algorithm and comparison models were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). Experimental result showed that the optimal adjusting coefficients for direct trust, indirect trust, direct distrust, indirect distrust were 0, 1.4287, 1.5, 0.4615 each. This implies that distrust relationships between users are more important than trust ones in recommender systems. From the perspective of recommendation accuracy, SNACF-GA (Avg. MAE = 0.111943), the proposed algorithm which reflects both direct and indirect trust / distrust relationships information, was found to greatly outperform a conventional CF (Avg. MAE = 0.112638). Also, the algorithm showed better recommendation accuracy than the SNACF (Avg. MAE = 0.112209). To confirm whether these differences are statistically significant or not, we applied paired samples t-test. The results from the paired samples t-test presented that the difference between SNACF-GA and conventional CF was statistical significant at the 1% significance level, and the difference between SNACF-GA and SNACF was statistical significant at the 5%. Our study found that the trust/distrust relationship can be important information for improving performance of recommendation algorithms. Especially, distrust relationship information was found to have a greater impact on the performance improvement of CF. This implies that we need to have more attention on distrust (negative) relationships rather than trust (positive) ones when tracking and managing social relationships between users.