Predicting the Performance of Recommender Systems through Social Network Analysis and Artificial Neural Network

The recommender system is one of the possible solutions to assist customers in finding the items they would like to purchase. To date, a variety of recommendation techniques have been developed. One of the most successful recommendation techniques is Collaborative Filtering (CF) that has been used in a number of different applications such as recommending Web pages, movies, music, articles and products. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. Broadly, there are memory-based CF algorithms, model-based CF algorithms, and hybrid CF algorithms which combine CF with content-based techniques or other recommender systems. While many researchers have focused their efforts in improving CF performance, the theoretical justification of CF algorithms is lacking. That is, we do not know many things about how CF is done. Furthermore, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting the performances of CF algorithms in advance is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose an efficient approach to predict the performance of CF. Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are applied to develop our prediction model. CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. SNA facilitates an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in data for CF recommendations. An ANN model is developed through an analysis of network topology, such as network density, inclusiveness, clustering coefficient, network centralization, and Krackhardt's efficiency. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Inclusiveness refers to the number of nodes which are included within the various connected parts of the social network. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. Krackhardt's efficiency characterizes how dense the social network is beyond that barely needed to keep the social group even indirectly connected to one another. We use these social network measures as input variables of the ANN model. As an output variable, we use the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the ANN model, sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well-known department stores in Korea, was used. Total 396 experimental samples were gathered, and we used 40%, 40%, and 20% of them, for training, test, and validation, respectively. The 5-fold cross validation was also conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. The input variable measuring process consists of following three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used Net Miner 3 and UCINET 6.0 for SNA, and Clementine 11.1 for ANN modeling. The experiments reported that the ANN model has 92.61% estimated accuracy and 0.0049 RMSE. Thus, we can know that our prediction model helps decide whether CF is useful for a given application with certain data characteristics.

사회연결망분석과 인공신경망을 이용한 추천시스템 성능 예측

협업필터링 추천은 다양한 분야에서 활용되고 있지만 트랜잭션 데이터의 성격에 따라 추천 성능에 현저한 차이를 보이고 있다. 기존 연구에서는 이러한 추천 성능의 차이가 나타나는 이유에 대한 설명을 구체적으로 제시하지 못하고 있고 이에 따라 추천 성능의 예측 또한 연구된 바가 없다. 본 연구는 사회네트워크분석과 인공신경망 모형을 이용하여 협업필터링 추천시스템의 성능을 예측하고자 한다. 본 연구의 목적을 달성하기 위해 국내 백화점의 트랜잭션 데이터를 기반으로 형성되는 고객간 사회 네트워크의 구조적 지표를 측정한 후 이를 기반으로 인공신경망 모형을 구축하고 검증한다. 본 연구는 협업필터링 추천 성능을 예측할 수 있는 새로운 모형을 제시하였다는 점에서 그 의의가 있으며 이를 통해 기업들의 협업필터링 추천시스템 도입에 대한 의사결정에 도움을 줄 수 있을 것으로 기대된다.