• 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.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.109-132
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• 2005

With the flood of multimedia contents over the digital TV channels, the internet, and etc., users sometimes have a difficulty in finding their preferred contents, spend heavy surfing time to find them, and are even very likely to miss them while searching. In this paper we suggests two-step clustering technique using time schema on how the system can recommend the user's preferred contents based on the collaborative filtering that has been proved to be successful when new users appeared. This method maps and recommends users' profile according to the gender and age at the first step, and then recommends a probabilistic item clustering customers who choose the same item at the same time based on time schema at the second stage. In addition, this has improved the accuracy of predictions in recommendation and the efficiency in time calculation by reflecting feedbacks of the result of the recommender engine and dynamically update customers' preference.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.50 no.3
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• pp.319-336
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• 2024

Ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) has attracted increasing attention in prefabricated steel-concrete composite beams as achieving the onsite construction time savings and structural performance improvement. The inferior replacement and removal efficiency of conventional prefabricated steel-UHPC composite beams (PSUCBs) has thwarted its sustainable applications because of the widely used welded-connectors. Single embedded nut bolted shear connectors (SENBs) have recently introduced as an attempt to enhance demountability of PSUCBs. An in-depth exploration of the mechanical behavior of SENBs in UHPC is necessary to evidence feasibilities of corresponding PSUCBs. However, existing research has been limited to SENB arrangement impacts and lacked considerations on SENB geometric configuration counterparts. To this end, this paper performed twenty push-out tests and theoretical analyses on the shear performance and design recommendation of SENBs. Key test parameters comprised the diameter and grade of SENBs, degree and sequence of pretension, concrete casting method and connector type. Test results indicated that both diameters and grades of bolts exerted remarkable impacts on the SENB shear performance with respect to the shear and frictional responses. Also, there was limited influence of the bolt preload degrees on the shear capacity and ductility of SENBs, but non-negligible contributions to their corresponding frictional resistance and initial shear stiffness. Moreover, inverse pretension sequences or monolithic cast slabs presented slight improvements in the ultimate shear and slip capacity. Finally, design-oriented models with higher accuracy were introduced for predictions of the ultimate shear resistance and load-slip relationship of SENBs in PSUCBs.

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