• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.17-35
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• 2015

Demand forecasting is the activity of estimating the quantity of a product or service that consumers will purchase for a certain period of time. Developing precise forecasting models are considered important since corporates can make strategic decisions on new markets based on future demand estimated by the models. Many studies have developed market growth curve models, such as Bass, Logistic, Gompertz models, which estimate future demand when a market is in its early stage. Among the models, Bass model, which explains the demand from two types of adopters, innovators and imitators, has been widely used in forecasting. Such models require sufficient demand observations to ensure qualified results. In the beginning of a new market, however, observations are not sufficient for the models to precisely estimate the market's future demand. For this reason, as an alternative, demands guessed from those of most adjacent markets are often used as references in such cases. Reference markets can be those whose products are developed with the same categorical technologies. A market's demand may be expected to have the similar pattern with that of a reference market in case the adoption pattern of a product in the market is determined mainly by the technology related to the product. However, such processes may not always ensure pleasing results because the similarity between markets depends on intuition and/or experience. There are two major drawbacks that human experts cannot effectively handle in this approach. One is the abundance of candidate reference markets to consider, and the other is the difficulty in calculating the similarity between markets. First, there can be too many markets to consider in selecting reference markets. Mostly, markets in the same category in an industrial hierarchy can be reference markets because they are usually based on the similar technologies. However, markets can be classified into different categories even if they are based on the same generic technologies. Therefore, markets in other categories also need to be considered as potential candidates. Next, even domain experts cannot consistently calculate the similarity between markets with their own qualitative standards. The inconsistency implies missing adjacent reference markets, which may lead to the imprecise estimation of future demand. Even though there are no missing reference markets, the new market's parameters can be hardly estimated from the reference markets without quantitative standards. For this reason, this study proposes a case-based expert system that helps experts overcome the drawbacks in discovering referential markets. First, this study proposes the use of Euclidean distance measure to calculate the similarity between markets. Based on their similarities, markets are grouped into clusters. Then, missing markets with the characteristics of the cluster are searched for. Potential candidate reference markets are extracted and recommended to users. After the iteration of these steps, definite reference markets are determined according to the user's selection among those candidates. Then, finally, the new market's parameters are estimated from the reference markets. For this procedure, two techniques are used in the model. One is clustering data mining technique, and the other content-based filtering of recommender systems. The proposed system implemented with those techniques can determine the most adjacent markets based on whether a user accepts candidate markets. Experiments were conducted to validate the usefulness of the system with five ICT experts involved. In the experiments, the experts were given the list of 16 ICT markets whose parameters to be estimated. For each of the markets, the experts estimated its parameters of growth curve models with intuition at first, and then with the system. The comparison of the experiments results show that the estimated parameters are closer when they use the system in comparison with the results when they guessed them without the system.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.67-74
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• 2011

Collaborative recommendation is one of the most widely used methods of automated product recommendation in e-Commerce. For analyzing the customer's preference, traditional explicit ratings are less desirable than implicit ratings because it may impose an additional burden to the customers of e-commerce companies which deals with a number of products. Cardinal scales generally used for representing the preference intensity also ineffective owing to its increasing estimation errors. In this paper, we propose a new way of constructing the ordinal scale-based customer profile for collaborative recommendation. A Web usage mining technique and lexicographic consensus are employed. An experiment shows that the proposed method performs better than existing CF methodologies.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.155-183
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• 2012

Means-Ends Network model was used to identify factors of means objective(means supplied by vendor) and fundamental objectives(purchasing motivations) for purchasing decision-making structure and dimensions of customer values on purchasers of internet shopping mall in Korea and China. In Means-Ends Network 6 factors(shopping travel, shipping assurance, vendor trust, online payment, product choice, and recommender systems) were found as a means objectives and 3 factors(shopping convenience, internet environment, customer support) as a fundamental objectives of shopping. However the results of hypotheses test for Means-Ends Network show some important differences between two countries. Something important to notice here is that Chinese customers shopping in China recognize shipping assurance factor and vendor trust factor as important factors satisfying all fundamental objectives unlike as in the case of our country. As these two factors are attribution factors responsible to the sellers, it is identified that customers do not trust the sellers and sellers have not met the expectations of customers. Therefore, these results show that the seller efforts assuring the reliability of the seller themselves, such as conducting its own compensation scheme are more important rather than the establishment of the guarantee institution to guarantee reliability and delivery assurance of sellers and implementation of legal and institutional apparatus such as the settlement of e-commerce licence system. Though this study presents such an important marketing implications, it can be pointed out that the limits are this research was done on the general Internet shopping malls without considering the Internet shopping mall types of diversity, the survey was designed around the student samples for convenience of the investigation because it was an international survey and the collected data has been limited to the western coast cities, such as China's Beijing, Shanghai, and Dalian.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.69-80
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• 2007

The preferences of customers change over time. However, existing collaborative filtering (CF) systems are static, since they only incorporate information regarding whether a customer buys a product during a certain period and do not make use of the purchase sequences of customers. Therefore, the quality of the recommendations of the typical CF could be improved through the use of information on such sequences. In this study, we propose a new methodology for enhancing the quality of CF recommendation that uses customer purchase sequences. The proposed methodology is applied to a large department store in Korea and compared to existing CF techniques. Various experiments using real-world data demonstrate that the proposed methodology provides higher quality recommendations than do typical CF techniques with better performance.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.195-211
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• 2010

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.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.13D no.5 s.108
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• pp.661-670
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• 2006

With the development of e-Commerce and the proliferation of easily accessible information, information filtering systems such as recommender and SDI systems have become popular to prune large information spaces so that users are directed toward those items that best meet their needs and preferences. Until now, many information filtering methods have been proposed to support filtering systems. XML is emerging as a new standard for information. Recently, filtering systems need new approaches in dealing with XML documents. So, in this paper our system suggests a method to create multiform user profiles with XML's ability to represent structure. This system consists of two parts; one is an administrator profile definition part that an administrator defines to analyze users purchase pattern before a transaction such as purchase happens directly. an other is a user profile creation part module which is applied by the defined profile. Administrator profiles are made from DTD information and it is supposed to point the specific part of a document conforming to the DTD. Proposed system builds user's profile more accurately to get adaptability for user's behavior of buying and provide useful product information without inefficient searching based on such user's profile.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.249-263
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• 2023

Collaborative Filtering, a representative recommendation system methodology, consists of two approaches: neighbor methods and latent factor models. Among these, the latent factor model using matrix factorization decomposes the user-item interaction matrix into two lower-dimensional rectangular matrices, predicting the item's rating through the product of these matrices. Due to the factor vectors inferred from rating patterns capturing user and item characteristics, this method is superior in scalability, accuracy, and flexibility compared to neighbor-based methods. However, it has a fundamental drawback: the need to reflect the diversity of preferences of different individuals for items with no ratings. This limitation leads to repetitive and inaccurate recommendations. The Adaptive Deep Latent Factor Model (ADLFM) was developed to address this issue. This model adaptively learns the preferences for each item by using the item description, which provides a detailed summary and explanation of the item. ADLFM takes in item description as input, calculates latent vectors of the user and item, and presents a method that can reflect personal diversity using an attention score. However, due to the requirement of a dataset that includes item descriptions, the domain that can apply ADLFM is limited, resulting in generalization limitations. This study proposes a Generalized Adaptive Deep Latent Factor Recommendation Model, G-ADLFRM, to improve the limitations of ADLFM. Firstly, we use item ID, commonly used in recommendation systems, as input instead of the item description. Additionally, we apply improved deep learning model structures such as Self-Attention, Multi-head Attention, and Multi-Conv1D. We conducted experiments on various datasets with input and model structure changes. The results showed that when only the input was changed, MAE increased slightly compared to ADLFM due to accompanying information loss, resulting in decreased recommendation performance. However, the average learning speed per epoch significantly improved as the amount of information to be processed decreased. When both the input and the model structure were changed, the best-performing Multi-Conv1d structure showed similar performance to ADLFM, sufficiently counteracting the information loss caused by the input change. We conclude that G-ADLFRM is a new, lightweight, and generalizable model that maintains the performance of the existing ADLFM while enabling fast learning and inference.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.111-126
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• 2017

Recommender systems based on association rule mining significantly contribute to seller's sales by reducing consumers' time to search for products that they want. Recommendations based on the frequency of transactions such as orders can effectively screen out the products that are statistically marketable among multiple products. A product with a high possibility of sales, however, can be omitted from the recommendation if it records insufficient number of transactions at the beginning of the sale. Products missing from the associated recommendations may lose the chance of exposure to consumers, which leads to a decline in the number of transactions. In turn, diminished transactions may create a vicious circle of lost opportunity to be recommended. Thus, initial sales are likely to remain stagnant for a certain period of time. Products that are susceptible to fashion or seasonality, such as clothing, may be greatly affected. This study was aimed at expanding association rules to include into the list of recommendations those products whose initial trading frequency of transactions is low despite the possibility of high sales. The particular purpose is to predict the strength of the direct connection of two unconnected items through the properties of the paths located between them. An association between two items revealed in transactions can be interpreted as the interaction between them, which can be expressed as a link in a social network whose nodes are items. The first step calculates the centralities of the nodes in the middle of the paths that indirectly connect the two nodes without direct connection. The next step identifies the number of the paths and the shortest among them. These extracts are used as independent variables in the regression analysis to predict future connection strength between the nodes. The strength of the connection between the two nodes of the model, which is defined by the number of nodes between the two nodes, is measured after a certain period of time. The regression analysis results confirm that the number of paths between the two products, the distance of the shortest path, and the number of neighboring items connected to the products are significantly related to their potential strength. This study used actual order transaction data collected for three months from February to April in 2016 from an online commerce company. To reduce the complexity of analytics as the scale of the network grows, the analysis was performed only on miscellaneous goods. Two consecutively purchased items were chosen from each customer's transactions to obtain a pair of antecedent and consequent, which secures a link needed for constituting a social network. The direction of the link was determined in the order in which the goods were purchased. Except for the last ten days of the data collection period, the social network of associated items was built for the extraction of independent variables. The model predicts the number of links to be connected in the next ten days from the explanatory variables. Of the 5,711 previously unconnected links, 611 were newly connected for the last ten days. Through experiments, the proposed model demonstrated excellent predictions. Of the 571 links that the proposed model predicts, 269 were confirmed to have been connected. This is 4.4 times more than the average of 61, which can be found without any prediction model. This study is expected to be useful regarding industries whose new products launch quickly with short life cycles, since their exposure time is critical. Also, it can be used to detect diseases that are rarely found in the early stages of medical treatment because of the low incidence of outbreaks. Since the complexity of the social networking analysis is sensitive to the number of nodes and links that make up the network, this study was conducted in a particular category of miscellaneous goods. Future research should consider that this condition may limit the opportunity to detect unexpected associations between products belonging to different categories of classification.