Personalized Exhibition Booth Recommendation Methodology Using Sequential Association Rule

An exhibition is defined as market events for specific duration to present exhibitors' main product range to either business or private visitors, and it also plays a key role as effective marketing channels. Especially, as the effect of the opinions of the visitors after the exhibition impacts directly on sales or the image of companies, exhibition organizers must consider various needs of visitors. To meet needs of visitors, ubiquitous technologies have been applied in some exhibitions. However, despite of the development of the ubiquitous technologies, their services cannot always reflect visitors' preferences as they only generate information when visitors request. As a result, they have reached their limit to meet needs of visitors, which consequently might lead them to loss of marketing opportunity. Recommendation systems can be the right type to overcome these limitations. They can recommend the booths to coincide with visitors' preferences, so that they help visitors who are in difficulty for choices in exhibition environment. One of the most successful and widely used technologies for building recommender systems is called Collaborative Filtering. Traditional recommender systems, however, only use neighbors' evaluations or behaviors for a personalized prediction. Therefore, they can not reflect visitors' dynamic preference, and also lack of accuracy in exhibition environment. Although there is much useful information to infer visitors' preference in ubiquitous environment (e.g., visitors' current location, booth visit path, and so on), they use only limited information for recommendation. In this study, we propose a booth recommendation methodology using Sequential Association Rule which considers the sequence of visiting. Recent studies of Sequential Association Rule use the constraints to improve the performance. However, since traditional Sequential Association Rule considers the whole rules to recommendation, they have a scalability problem when they are adapted to a large exhibition scale. To solve this problem, our methodology composes the confidence database before recommendation process. To compose the confidence database, we first search preceding rules which have the frequency above threshold. Next, we compute the confidences of each preceding rules to each booth which is not contained in preceding rules. Therefore, the confidence database has two kinds of information which are preceding rules and their confidence to each booth. In recommendation process, we just generate preceding rules of the target visitors based on the records of the visits, and recommend booths according to the confidence database. Throughout these steps, we expect reduction of time spent on recommendation process. To evaluate proposed methodology, we use real booth visit records which are collected by RFID technology in IT exhibition. Booth visit records also contain the visit sequence of each visitor. We compare the performance of proposed methodology with traditional Collaborative Filtering system. As a result, our proposed methodology generally shows higher performance than traditional Collaborative Filtering. We can also see some features of it in experimental results. First, it shows the highest performance at one booth recommendation. It detects preceding rules with some portions of visitors. Therefore, if there is a visitor who moved with very a different pattern compared to the whole visitors, it cannot give a correct recommendation for him/her even though we increase the number of recommendation. Trained by the whole visitors, it cannot correctly give recommendation to visitors who have a unique path. Second, the performance of general recommendation systems increase as time expands. However, our methodology shows higher performance with limited information like one or two time periods. Therefore, not only can it recommend even if there is not much information of the target visitors' booth visit records, but also it uses only small amount of information in recommendation process. We expect that it can give real?time recommendations in exhibition environment. Overall, our methodology shows higher performance ability than traditional Collaborative Filtering systems, we expect it could be applied in booth recommendation system to satisfy visitors in exhibition environment.

순차 연관 규칙을 이용한 개인화된 전시 부스 추천 방법

전시회는 전시업체가 새로운 상품이나 서비스를 관람객에게 알리기 위해 개최되는 것으로 효과적인 마케팅 수단으로 중요한 역할을 수행한다. 전시회를 방문하는 다양한 관람객의 니즈를 충족시키기 위하여 다양한 유비쿼터스 기술이 전시회에 응용되고 있지만 관람객이 사전에 요청한 정보만을 제공함으로 개별 관람객의 선호가 반영되지 않아 관람객의 니즈를 충족시키기에는 한계가 있다. 이러한 한계를 해결하기 위한 방법으로 개인의 선호에 부합하는 부스를 추천하는 추천 시스템의 이용이 가능하다. 추천시스템은 전시 환경에서 관람객의 선호를 추론하여 선호에 부합하는 방문 부스를 추천하여 관람객의 니즈를 충족시킬 수 있다. 그러나 추천 시스템 중 가장 성공적으로 평가 받는 기존의 협업 필터링은 관람객의 부스 방문 순서에 나타나는 선호를 반영하지 않아 동적으로 변화하는 선호를 가지는 관람객으로 구성된 전시 환경의 추천 시스템으로는 적합하지 않다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 관람객의 방문 순서를 고려하는 기법 중 순차 연관 규칙을 이용하여 관람객의 선호에 부합하는 부스를 추천하는 방법론을 제안하였다. 본 연구에서 제안한 방법론의 성과 측정을 위해 실제 전시회에서 획득한 데이터를 사용하여 기존의 협업 필터링과 비교한 결과 전체적으로 추천의 성과가 향상되어 향후 전시 환경에서의 부스 추천시스템에 적용하여 관람객의 니즈를 충족시킬 것으로 기대된다.