• Journal of Information Technology Services
• /
• v.22 no.1
• /
• pp.43-56
• /
• 2023

With the development of the e-commerce market, various types of products continue to be released. However, customers face an information overload problem in purchasing decision-making. Therefore, personalized recommendations have become an essential service in providing personalized products to customers. Recently, many studies on GCN-based recommender systems have been actively conducted. Such a methodology can address the limitation in disabling to effectively reflect the interaction between customer and product in the embedding process. However, previous studies mainly use implicit feedback data to conduct experiments. Although implicit feedback data improves the data scarcity problem, it cannot represent customers' preferences for specific products. Therefore, this study proposed a novel model combining explicit and implicit feedback to address such a limitation. This study treats the average ratings of customers and products as the features of customers and products and converts them into a high-dimensional feature vector. Then, this study combines ID embedding vectors and feature vectors in the embedding layer to learn the customer-product interaction effectively. To evaluate recommendation performance, this study used the MovieLens dataset to conduct various experiments. Experimental results showed the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art. Therefore, the proposed model in this study can provide an enhanced recommendation service for customers to address the information overload problem.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.17 no.3
• /
• pp.147-168
• /
• 2011

As personalized recommendation of products and services is rapidly growing in importance, a number of studies provided fundamental knowledge and techniques for developing recommendation systems. Among them, the CF technique has been most widely used and has proven to be useful in many practices. However, current collaborative filtering (CF) technique has still considerable rooms for improving the effectiveness of recommendation systems: 1) a similarity function most systems use to find so-called like-minded people is not well defined in that similarity is computed from a single perspective of similarity concept; and 2) temporal information that contains the changing preference of customers needs to be taken into account when making recommendations. We hypothesize that integration of multiple aspects of similarity and utilization of temporal information will improve the accuracy of recommendations. The objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis through a series of experiments using MovieLens data. The experimental results show that the proposed recommendation system highly outperforms the conventional CF-based systems, confirming our hypothesis.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
• /
• v.17 no.3
• /
• pp.85-103
• /
• 2012

This study focused on user evaluation for personalized recommender systems with the integrated view of performance of the system and user attitude of recommender systems. Since users' evaluations of recommender systems can be affected by recommendation outcomes and presentation methods, both system performances based on outcomes and user attitudes formed by the presentation methods should be considered when explaining users' evaluations. However, an integrated view of system performance and user attitudes has not been applied to explain users' evaluation of recommender systems. Thus, the goal of this study is to explain users' evaluations of recommender systems under the integrated view of predictive features and explanation features at the same time. Our findings suggest that social presence, both accuracy and noveltyhave impacts onuser satisfaction for recommender systems. Especially, predictive features including accuracy and novelty affected user satisfaction. Novelty as well as accuracy is one of the significant factors for user satisfaction while recommender systems provided usual items users have experienced when systems provide serendipitous items. Likewise, explanation features with social presence and self-reference were important for user evaluation of personalized recommender systems. For explanation features, while social presence appears as one of important factors to user satisfaction of evaluating personalized recommendations, self-reference has no significant effect on user's satisfaction for recommender systems when compared to the result of social presence. Self-referencing messages did not affect user satisfaction but the levels of self-referencing are different between low and high groups in the experiment.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.119-135
• /
• 2012

Among various recommendation techniques, neighborhood-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) techniques have been one of the most widely used and best performing techniques in literature and industry. This paper proposes new approaches that can enhance the neighborhood-based CF techniques by identifying a few best neighbors (the most similar users to a target user) more accurately with more information about neighbors. The proposed approaches put more weights to the users who have more items co-rated by the target user in similarity computation, which can help to better understand the preferences of neighbors and eventually improve the recommendation quality. Experiments using movie rating data empirically demonstrate simultaneous improvements in both recommendation accuracy and diversity. In addition to the typical single rating setting, the proposed approaches can be applied to the multi-criteria rating setting where users can provide more information about their preferences, resulting in further improvements in recommendation quality. We finally introduce a single metric that measures the balance between accuracy and diversity and discuss potential avenues for future work.

• Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.66-82
• /
• 2021

Recommender Systems have gained immense popularity due to their capability of dealing with a massive amount of information in various domains. They are considered information filtering systems that make predictions or recommendations to users based on their interests and preferences. The more recent technology, Linked Open Data (LOD), has been introduced, and a vast amount of Resource Description Framework data have been published in freely accessible datasets. These datasets are connected to form the so-called LOD cloud. The need for semantic data representation has been identified as one of the next challenges in Recommender Systems. In a LOD-enabled recommendation framework where domain awareness plays a key role, the semantic information provided in the LOD can be exploited. However, dealing with a big chunk of the data from the LOD cloud and its integration with any domain datasets remains a challenge due to various issues, such as resource constraints and broken links. This paper presents the challenges of interconnecting and extracting the DBpedia data with the MovieLens 1 Million dataset. This study demonstrates how LOD can be a vital yet rich source of content knowledge that helps recommender systems address the issues of data sparsity and insufficient content analysis. Based on the challenges, we proposed a few alternatives and solutions to some of the challenges.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.20 no.2
• /
• pp.137-148
• /
• 2014

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