• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.183-188
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• 2021

Collaborative filtering based recommender systems are currently indispensable function of commercial systems in various fields, being a useful service by providing customized products that users will prefer. However, there is a high possibility that the prediction of preferrable products is inaccurate, when the user's rating data are insufficient. In order to overcome this drawback, this study suggests a stepwise method for prediction of product ratings. If the application conditions of the prediction method corresponding to each step are not satisfied, the method of the next step is applied. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments using a public dataset are conducted. As a result, our method significantly improves prediction and precision performance of collaborative filtering systems employing various conventional similarity measures and outperforms performance of the previous methods for solving rating data sparsity.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.27-44
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• 2020

In order to solve the user's information overload problem, recommender systems infer users' preferences and suggest items that match them. The collaborative filtering (CF), the most successful recommendation algorithm, has been improving performance until recently and applied to various business domains. Visual information, such as book covers, could influence consumers' purchase decision making. However, CF-based recommender systems have rarely considered for visual information. In this study, we propose VizNCS, a CF-based deep learning model that uses visual information as additional information. VizNCS consists of two phases. In the first phase, we build convolutional neural networks (CNN) to extract visual features from image data. In the second phase, we supply the visual features to the NCF model that is known to easy to extend to other information among the deep learning-based recommendation systems. As the results of the performance comparison experiments, VizNCS showed higher performance than the vanilla NCF. We also conducted an additional experiment to see if the visual information affects differently depending on the product category. The result enables us to identify which categories were affected and which were not. We expect VizNCS to improve the recommender system performance and expand the recommender system's data source to visual information.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.207-222
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• 2008

This research suggests the method of how to build agricultural and stockbreeding products recommender systems based on RFID technology for monitoring crop and livestock production, tracing production history as an application strategy. In the past the studies on enterprise applications have been barely implemented owing to the rack of business model and limitation of technical development. Currently however there have been enormous technological progress of RFID and agricultural and stockbreeding products retailing sites are increased. Therefore this paper suggests PDCF-ASP(Profile Decay based Collaborative Fltering for Agricultural and Stockbreeding Products) which is designed to reduce customers… search efforts in finding safety and fresh products on the internet shopping mall. For this, product decay function is defined to make sure whether the products are safety or not and to adopt a change in customer preferences. And for the implementation of PDCF-ASP, the system structure including functional agents is schematized.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.31-50
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• 2009

As the collected information which is static or dynamic is infinite in ubiquitous computing environments, information overload and invasion of privacy have been pressing issues in the recommendation service. In this study, we propose a recommendation service procedure through P2P, The P2P helps customer to obtain effective and secure product information because of communication among customers who have the similar preference about the products without connection to server. To evaluate the performance of the proposed recommendation service, we utilized real transaction and product data of the Korean mobile company which service character images. We developed a prototype recommender system and demonstrated that the proposed recommendation service makes an effect on recommending product in the ubiquitous environments. We expect that the information overload and invasion of privacy will be solved by the proposed recommendation procedure in ubiquitous environment.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.181-201
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• 2006

As the Internet spreads, many people have interests in e-CRM and product recommender systems, one of e-CRM applications. Among various approaches for recommendation, collaborative filtering and content-based approaches have been investigated and applied widely. Despite their popularity, traditional recommendation approaches have some limitations. They require at least one purchase transaction per user. In addition, they don't utilize much information such as demographic and specific personal profile information. This study suggests new hybrid recommendation model using two data mining techniques, association rule and classification, as well as intelligent agent to overcome these limitations. To validate the usefulness of the model, it was applied to the real case and the prototype web site was developed. We assessed the usefulness of the suggested recommendation model through online survey. The result of the survey showed that the information of the recommendation was generally useful to the survey participants.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.19-42
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• 2012

Consumer consumption patterns are shifting rapidly as buyers migrate from offline markets to e-commerce routes, such as shopping channels on TV and internet shopping malls. In the offline markets consumers go shopping, see the shopping items, and choose from them. Recently consumers tend towards buying at shopping sites free from time and place. However, as e-commerce markets continue to expand, customers are complaining that it is becoming a bigger hassle to shop online. In the online shopping, shoppers have very limited information on the products. The delivered products can be different from what they have wanted. This case results to purchase cancellation. Because these things happen frequently, they are likely to refer to the consumer reviews and companies should be concerned about consumer's voice. E-commerce is a very important marketing tool for suppliers. It can recommend products to customers and connect them directly with suppliers with just a click of a button. The recommender system is being studied in various ways. Some of the more prominent ones include recommendation based on best-seller and demographics, contents filtering, and collaborative filtering. However, these systems all share two weaknesses : they cannot recommend products to consumers on a personal level, and they cannot recommend products to new consumers with no buying history. To fix these problems, we can use the information which has been collected from the questionnaires about their demographics and preference ratings. But, consumers feel these questionnaires are a burden and are unlikely to provide correct information. This study investigates combining collaborative filtering with the centrality of social network analysis. This centrality measure provides the information to infer the preference of new consumers from the shopping history of existing and previous ones. While the past researches had focused on the existing consumers with similar shopping patterns, this study tried to improve the accuracy of recommendation with all shopping information, which included not only similar shopping patterns but also dissimilar ones. Data used in this study, Movie Lens' data, was made by Group Lens research Project Team at University of Minnesota to recommend movies with a collaborative filtering technique. This data was built from the questionnaires of 943 respondents which gave the information on the preference ratings on 1,684 movies. Total data of 100,000 was organized by time, with initial data of 50,000 being existing customers and the latter 50,000 being new customers. The proposed recommender system consists of three systems : [+] group recommender system, [-] group recommender system, and integrated recommender system. [+] group recommender system looks at customers with similar buying patterns as 'neighbors', whereas [-] group recommender system looks at customers with opposite buying patterns as 'contraries'. Integrated recommender system uses both of the aforementioned recommender systems to recommend movies that both recommender systems pick. The study of three systems allows us to find the most suitable recommender system that will optimize accuracy and customer satisfaction. Our analysis showed that integrated recommender system is the best solution among the three systems studied, followed by [-] group recommended system and [+] group recommender system. This result conforms to the intuition that the accuracy of recommendation can be improved using all the relevant information. We provided contour maps and graphs to easily compare the accuracy of each recommender system. Although we saw improvement on accuracy with the integrated recommender system, we must remember that this research is based on static data with no live customers. In other words, consumers did not see the movies actually recommended from the system. Also, this recommendation system may not work well with products other than movies. Thus, it is important to note that recommendation systems need particular calibration for specific product/customer types.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.119-137
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• 2022

Recent recommendation system studies apply various deep learning models to represent user and item interactions better. One of the noteworthy studies is ONCF(Outer product-based Neural Collaborative Filtering) which builds a two-dimensional interaction map via outer product and employs CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks) to learn high-order correlations from the map. However, ONCF has limitations in recommendation performance due to the problems with CNN and the absence of side information. ONCF using CNN has an inductive bias problem that causes poor performances for data with a distribution that does not appear in the training data. This paper proposes to employ a Vision Transformer (ViT) instead of the vanilla CNN used in ONCF. The reason is that ViT showed better results than state-of-the-art CNN in many image classification cases. In addition, we propose a new architecture to reflect side information that ONCF did not consider. Unlike previous studies that reflect side information in a neural network using simple input combination methods, this study uses an independent auxiliary classifier to reflect side information more effectively in the recommender system. ONCF used a single latent vector for user and item, but in this study, a channel is constructed using multiple vectors to enable the model to learn more diverse expressions and to obtain an ensemble effect. The experiments showed our deep learning model improved performance in recommendation compared to ONCF.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.556-571
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• 2020

This study predicts consumer preference for social clothing at work, excluding uniforms using the self-product congruence theory that also establishes a model to predict the preference for recommended products that match the consumer's own image. A total of 490 Korean male office workers participated in this study. Participants' self-image and the product images of 20 apparel items were measured using nine adjective semantic scales (namely elegant, stable, sincere, refined, intense, luxury, bold, conspicuous, and polite). A model was then constructed to predict the consumer preferences using a neural network with Python and TensorFlow. The resulting Predict Preference Model using Product Image (PPMPI) was trained using product image and the preference of each product. Current research confirms that product preference can be predicted by the self-image instead of by entering the product image. The prediction accuracy rate of the PPMPI was over 80%. We used 490 items of test data consisting of self-images to predict the consumer preferences for using the PPMPI. The test of the PPMPI showed that the prediction rate differed depending on product attributes. The prediction rate of work apparel with normative images was over 70% and higher than for other forms of apparel.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.279-299
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• 2013

The problem of choosing the right product that will best fit a consumer's taste and preferences extends to the field of electronic commerce. However, e-commerce has been able to create a technological proxy for the social filtering process, known as online recommender systems (RSs). RSs aid users in filtering products and decisions on matters relating to personal taste. RSs have the potential to support and improve the quality of the decisions consumers make when searching for and selecting products and services online. However, most previous research on RSs has focused on the accuracy of the algorithms, with little emphasis on user interface and perspectives. This study identified transparency and feedback as possible ways to effectively evaluate RSs from the user's perspective. Thus, this research focused on examining and identifying the roles of transparency and feedback in recommender systems and how they affect users' attitudes toward the system. Results of the study showed that both transparency and feedback positively and significantly affected perceived trust, perceived value of the process, and perceived enjoyment. Furthermore, we found that perceived trust, perceived value of the process, and perceived enjoyment positively and directly affected users' intentions to use/reuse a recommender system.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.27-42
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• 2020

Traditional companies with offline stores were unable to secure large display space due to the problems of cost. This limitation inevitably allowed limited kinds of products to be displayed on the shelves, which resulted in consumers being deprived of the opportunity to experience various items. Taking advantage of the virtual space called the Internet, online shopping goes beyond the limits of limitations in physical space of offline shopping and is now able to display numerous products on web pages that can satisfy consumers with a variety of needs. Paradoxically, however, this can also cause consumers to experience the difficulty of comparing and evaluating too many alternatives in their purchase decision-making process. As an effort to address this side effect, various kinds of consumer's purchase decision support systems have been studied, such as keyword-based item search service and recommender systems. These systems can reduce search time for items, prevent consumer from leaving while browsing, and contribute to the seller's increased sales. Among those systems, recommender systems based on association rule mining techniques can effectively detect interrelated products from transaction data such as orders. The association between products obtained by statistical analysis provides clues to predicting how interested consumers will be in another product. However, since its algorithm is based on the number of transactions, products not sold enough so far in the early days of launch may not be included in the list of recommendations even though they are highly likely to be sold. Such missing items may not have sufficient opportunities to be exposed to consumers to record sufficient sales, and then fall into a vicious cycle of a vicious cycle of declining sales and omission in the recommendation list. This situation is an inevitable outcome in situations in which recommendations are made based on past transaction histories, rather than on determining potential future sales possibilities. This study started with the idea that reflecting the means by which this potential possibility can be identified indirectly would help to select highly recommended products. In the light of the fact that the attributes of a product affect the consumer's purchasing decisions, this study was conducted to reflect them in the recommender systems. In other words, consumers who visit a product page have shown interest in the attributes of the product and would be also interested in other products with the same attributes. On such assumption, based on these attributes, the recommender system can select recommended products that can show a higher acceptance rate. Given that a category is one of the main attributes of a product, it can be a good indicator of not only direct associations between two items but also potential associations that have yet to be revealed. Based on this idea, the study devised a recommender system that reflects not only associations between products but also categories. Through regression analysis, two kinds of associations were combined to form a model that could predict the hit rate of recommendation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, another regression model was also developed based only on associations between products. Comparative experiments were designed to be similar to the environment in which products are actually recommended in online shopping malls. First, the association rules for all possible combinations of antecedent and consequent items were generated from the order data. Then, hit rates for each of the associated rules were predicted from the support and confidence that are calculated by each of the models. The comparative experiments using order data collected from an online shopping mall show that the recommendation accuracy can be improved by further reflecting not only the association between products but also categories in the recommendation of related products. The proposed model showed a 2 to 3 percent improvement in hit rates compared to the existing model. From a practical point of view, it is expected to have a positive effect on improving consumers' purchasing satisfaction and increasing sellers' sales.