A Study on the Cost Analysis of Service Export - K SME Case of MICE-related Industry - (서비스 수출원가 분석 - MICE 산업 관련 중소기업 사례연구 -)
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- International Commerce and Information Review
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- v.13 no.4
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- pp.485-516
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- 2011
Republic of Korea is small nation that is comprised of 0.7% of the world population and occupying just 0.07% of the world territory. Despite this, Republic of Korea once again proved herself to be as the world's major economic powerhouse by becoming the world's 7th largest exporter in 2010. However, the reality is that Republic of Korea is still significantly concerned about the volatile economic nature and anxiety that is spread across the globe since the global depression that began at the end of 2008 and the financial crisis that has been threatening the Euro-Zone recently. This has resulted in the nation reaching the limitation in significant economic growth and limited creation of jobs within the nation and due to such circumstances, the nation is becoming more aware of the fact that she needs to pay more attention on the service sector and service exports if she was to see a more positive economic outlook in the upcoming future. This research is aimed to analyse the cost that is associated with the service export sector, by examining a number of enterprises in relation to the MICE(Meeting Incentives Convention Exhibition) industry which certainly has both direct and indirect influences on the service exports of the nation Further, the prime goal of the research is to encourage the SMEs of Korea, who have substandard experience associated to foreign exports, to intensify and increase service exports and also the goal extends to the degree to suggest appropriate assistance measures to aid these enterprises to achieve such goals. This research is fundamentally designed and based on the literature research associated with the MICE industry and also, this research is premeditated through the analysis of the case of exports to Vietnam. As the result of research, it has been found out that SMEs in the MICE industry and those of in service export sector are reluctant or even feel insecure to attempt any kind of export of their services mainly due to; the lack of foreign market information and also the lack of experience associated with service exports. Furthermore, it has also been revealed that the difficulty to estimate the validity and profitability of service the export is a significant factor withholding those enterprises from attempting any service export to the foreign markets. Henceforth, in order to aid and stimulate service export to the foreign markets by these SMEs (including those in association with the MICE industry), it is imperative to prepare an one-stop service export assistance program which would provide the information associated with marketing, law and legislation, taxation system and financial area in regard to the global markets.
Recently, due to the development of smart devices and social media, vast amounts of information with the various forms were accumulated. Particularly, considerable research efforts are being directed towards analyzing unstructured big data to resolve various social problems. Accordingly, focus of data-driven decision-making is being moved from structured data analysis to unstructured one. Also, in the field of recommendation system, which is the typical area of data-driven decision-making, the need of using unstructured data has been steadily increased to improve system performance. Approaches to improve the performance of recommendation systems can be found in two aspects- improving algorithms and acquiring useful data with high quality. Traditionally, most efforts to improve the performance of recommendation system were made by the former approach, while the latter approach has not attracted much attention relatively. In this sense, efforts to utilize unstructured data from variable sources are very timely and necessary. Particularly, as the interests of users are directly connected with their needs, identifying the interests of the user through unstructured big data analysis can be a crew for improving performance of recommendation systems. In this sense, this study proposes the methodology of improving recommendation system by measuring interests of the user. Specially, this study proposes the method to quantify interests of the user by analyzing user's internet usage patterns, and to predict user's repurchase based upon the discovered preferences. There are two important modules in this study. The first module predicts repurchase probability of each category through analyzing users' purchase history. We include the first module to our research scope for comparing the accuracy of traditional purchase-based prediction model to our new model presented in the second module. This procedure extracts purchase history of users. The core part of our methodology is in the second module. This module extracts users' interests by analyzing news articles the users have read. The second module constructs a correspondence matrix between topics and news articles by performing topic modeling on real world news articles. And then, the module analyzes users' news access patterns and then constructs a correspondence matrix between articles and users. After that, by merging the results of the previous processes in the second module, we can obtain a correspondence matrix between users and topics. This matrix describes users' interests in a structured manner. Finally, by using the matrix, the second module builds a model for predicting repurchase probability of each category. In this paper, we also provide experimental results of our performance evaluation. The outline of data used our experiments is as follows. We acquired web transaction data of 5,000 panels from a company that is specialized to analyzing ranks of internet sites. At first we extracted 15,000 URLs of news articles published from July 2012 to June 2013 from the original data and we crawled main contents of the news articles. After that we selected 2,615 users who have read at least one of the extracted news articles. Among the 2,615 users, we discovered that the number of target users who purchase at least one items from our target shopping mall 'G' is 359. In the experiments, we analyzed purchase history and news access records of the 359 internet users. From the performance evaluation, we found that our prediction model using both users' interests and purchase history outperforms a prediction model using only users' purchase history from a view point of misclassification ratio. In detail, our model outperformed the traditional one in appliance, beauty, computer, culture, digital, fashion, and sports categories when artificial neural network based models were used. Similarly, our model outperformed the traditional one in beauty, computer, digital, fashion, food, and furniture categories when decision tree based models were used although the improvement is very small.
Recently, increase of demand for big data analysis has been driving the vigorous development of related technologies and tools. In addition, development of IT and increased penetration rate of smart devices are producing a large amount of data. According to this phenomenon, data analysis technology is rapidly becoming popular. Also, attempts to acquire insights through data analysis have been continuously increasing. It means that the big data analysis will be more important in various industries for the foreseeable future. Big data analysis is generally performed by a small number of experts and delivered to each demander of analysis. However, increase of interest about big data analysis arouses activation of computer programming education and development of many programs for data analysis. Accordingly, the entry barriers of big data analysis are gradually lowering and data analysis technology being spread out. As the result, big data analysis is expected to be performed by demanders of analysis themselves. Along with this, interest about various unstructured data is continually increasing. Especially, a lot of attention is focused on using text data. Emergence of new platforms and techniques using the web bring about mass production of text data and active attempt to analyze text data. Furthermore, result of text analysis has been utilized in various fields. Text mining is a concept that embraces various theories and techniques for text analysis. Many text mining techniques are utilized in this field for various research purposes, topic modeling is one of the most widely used and studied. Topic modeling is a technique that extracts the major issues from a lot of documents, identifies the documents that correspond to each issue and provides identified documents as a cluster. It is evaluated as a very useful technique in that reflect the semantic elements of the document. Traditional topic modeling is based on the distribution of key terms across the entire document. Thus, it is essential to analyze the entire document at once to identify topic of each document. This condition causes a long time in analysis process when topic modeling is applied to a lot of documents. In addition, it has a scalability problem that is an exponential increase in the processing time with the increase of analysis objects. This problem is particularly noticeable when the documents are distributed across multiple systems or regions. To overcome these problems, divide and conquer approach can be applied to topic modeling. It means dividing a large number of documents into sub-units and deriving topics through repetition of topic modeling to each unit. This method can be used for topic modeling on a large number of documents with limited system resources, and can improve processing speed of topic modeling. It also can significantly reduce analysis time and cost through ability to analyze documents in each location or place without combining analysis object documents. However, despite many advantages, this method has two major problems. First, the relationship between local topics derived from each unit and global topics derived from entire document is unclear. It means that in each document, local topics can be identified, but global topics cannot be identified. Second, a method for measuring the accuracy of the proposed methodology should be established. That is to say, assuming that global topic is ideal answer, the difference in a local topic on a global topic needs to be measured. By those difficulties, the study in this method is not performed sufficiently, compare with other studies dealing with topic modeling. In this paper, we propose a topic modeling approach to solve the above two problems. First of all, we divide the entire document cluster(Global set) into sub-clusters(Local set), and generate the reduced entire document cluster(RGS, Reduced global set) that consist of delegated documents extracted from each local set. We try to solve the first problem by mapping RGS topics and local topics. Along with this, we verify the accuracy of the proposed methodology by detecting documents, whether to be discerned as the same topic at result of global and local set. Using 24,000 news articles, we conduct experiments to evaluate practical applicability of the proposed methodology. In addition, through additional experiment, we confirmed that the proposed methodology can provide similar results to the entire topic modeling. We also proposed a reasonable method for comparing the result of both methods.
Recommender system has become one of the most important technologies in e-commerce in these days. The ultimate reason to shop online, for many consumers, is to reduce the efforts for information search and purchase. Recommender system is a key technology to serve these needs. Many of the past studies about recommender systems have been devoted to developing and improving recommendation algorithms and collaborative filtering (CF) is known to be the most successful one. Despite its success, however, CF has several shortcomings such as cold-start, sparsity, gray sheep problems. In order to be able to generate recommendations, ordinary CF algorithms require evaluations or preference information directly from users. For new users who do not have any evaluations or preference information, therefore, CF cannot come up with recommendations (Cold-star problem). As the numbers of products and customers increase, the scale of the data increases exponentially and most of the data cells are empty. This sparse dataset makes computation for recommendation extremely hard (Sparsity problem). Since CF is based on the assumption that there are groups of users sharing common preferences or tastes, CF becomes inaccurate if there are many users with rare and unique tastes (Gray sheep problem). This study proposes a new algorithm that utilizes Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques to resolve the gray sheep problem. We utilize 'degree centrality' in SNA to identify users with unique preferences (gray sheep). Degree centrality in SNA refers to the number of direct links to and from a node. In a network of users who are connected through common preferences or tastes, those with unique tastes have fewer links to other users (nodes) and they are isolated from other users. Therefore, gray sheep can be identified by calculating degree centrality of each node. We divide the dataset into two, gray sheep and others, based on the degree centrality of the users. Then, different similarity measures and recommendation methods are applied to these two datasets. More detail algorithm is as follows: Step 1: Convert the initial data which is a two-mode network (user to item) into an one-mode network (user to user). Step 2: Calculate degree centrality of each node and separate those nodes having degree centrality values lower than the pre-set threshold. The threshold value is determined by simulations such that the accuracy of CF for the remaining dataset is maximized. Step 3: Ordinary CF algorithm is applied to the remaining dataset. Step 4: Since the separated dataset consist of users with unique tastes, an ordinary CF algorithm cannot generate recommendations for them. A 'popular item' method is used to generate recommendations for these users. The F measures of the two datasets are weighted by the numbers of nodes and summed to be used as the final performance metric. In order to test performance improvement by this new algorithm, an empirical study was conducted using a publically available dataset - the MovieLens data by GroupLens research team. We used 100,000 evaluations by 943 users on 1,682 movies. The proposed algorithm was compared with an ordinary CF algorithm utilizing 'Best-N-neighbors' and 'Cosine' similarity method. The empirical results show that F measure was improved about 11% on average when the proposed algorithm was used