• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.113-127
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• 2016

Among the techniques for recommendation, collaborative filtering (CF) is commonly recognized to be the most effective for implementing recommender systems. Until now, CF has been popularly studied and adopted in both academic and real-world applications. The basic idea of CF is to create recommendation results by finding correlations between users of a recommendation system. CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and recommend products to users by using other like-minded people's results of evaluation for each product. Thus, it is very important to compute evaluation similarities among users in CF because the recommendation quality depends on it. Typical CF uses user's explicit numeric ratings of items (i.e. quantitative information) when computing the similarities among users in CF. In other words, user's numeric ratings have been a sole source of user preference information in traditional CF. However, user ratings are unable to fully reflect user's actual preferences from time to time. According to several studies, users may more actively accommodate recommendation of reliable others when purchasing goods. Thus, trust relationship can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, we propose a new hybrid recommender system that fuses CF and social network analysis (SNA). The proposed system adopts the recommendation algorithm that additionally reflect the result analyzed by SNA. In detail, our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and trust relationship information between users when calculating user similarities. For this, our system creates and uses not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-to-user trust network. As the methods for calculating user similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is algorithm calculating the degree of similarity between users by utilizing in-degree and out-degree centrality, which are the indices representing the central location in the social network. We named these approaches as 'Trust CF - All' and 'Trust CF - Conditional'. The other alternative is the algorithm reflecting a neighbor's score higher when a target user trusts the neighbor directly or indirectly. The direct or indirect trust relationship can be identified by searching trust network of users. In this study, we call this approach 'Trust CF - Search'. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we used experimental data provided by LibRec that crawled from the entire FilmTrust website. It consists of ratings of movies and trust relationship network indicating who to trust between users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and UCINET 6. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared the performance of our proposed method with one of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender system were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). The analysis results confirmed that in case of applying without conditions the in-degree centrality index of trusted network of users(i.e. Trust CF - All), the accuracy (MAE = 0.565134) was lower than conventional CF (MAE = 0.564966). And, in case of applying the in-degree centrality index only to the users with the out-degree centrality above a certain threshold value(i.e. Trust CF - Conditional), the proposed system improved the accuracy a little (MAE = 0.564909) compared to traditional CF. However, the algorithm searching based on the trusted network of users (i.e. Trust CF - Search) was found to show the best performance (MAE = 0.564846). And the result from paired samples t-test presented that Trust CF - Search outperformed conventional CF with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of user's trust relationship network information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.19-38
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• 2017

Collaborative filtering (CF) algorithm has been popularly used for implementing recommender systems. Until now, there have been many prior studies to improve the accuracy of CF. Among them, some recent studies adopt 'hybrid recommendation approach', which enhances the performance of conventional CF by using additional information. In this research, we propose a new hybrid recommender system which fuses CF and the results from the social network analysis on trust and distrust relationship networks among users to enhance prediction accuracy. The proposed algorithm of our study is based on memory-based CF. But, when calculating the similarity between users in CF, our proposed algorithm considers not only the correlation of the users' numeric rating patterns, but also the users' in-degree centrality values derived from trust and distrust relationship networks. In specific, it is designed to amplify the similarity between a target user and his or her neighbor when the neighbor has higher in-degree centrality in the trust relationship network. Also, it attenuates the similarity between a target user and his or her neighbor when the neighbor has higher in-degree centrality in the distrust relationship network. Our proposed algorithm considers four (4) types of user relationships - direct trust, indirect trust, direct distrust, and indirect distrust - in total. And, it uses four adjusting coefficients, which adjusts the level of amplification / attenuation for in-degree centrality values derived from direct / indirect trust and distrust relationship networks. To determine optimal adjusting coefficients, genetic algorithms (GA) has been adopted. Under this background, we named our proposed algorithm as SNACF-GA (Social Network Analysis - based CF using GA). To validate the performance of the SNACF-GA, we used a real-world data set which is called 'Extended Epinions dataset' provided by 'trustlet.org'. It is the data set contains user responses (rating scores and reviews) after purchasing specific items (e.g. car, movie, music, book) as well as trust / distrust relationship information indicating whom to trust or distrust between users. The experimental system was basically developed using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but we also used UCINET 6 for calculating the in-degree centrality of trust / distrust relationship networks. In addition, we used Palisade Software's Evolver, which is a commercial software implements genetic algorithm. To examine the effectiveness of our proposed system more precisely, we adopted two comparison models. The first comparison model is conventional CF. It only uses users' explicit numeric ratings when calculating the similarities between users. That is, it does not consider trust / distrust relationship between users at all. The second comparison model is SNACF (Social Network Analysis - based CF). SNACF differs from the proposed algorithm SNACF-GA in that it considers only direct trust / distrust relationships. It also does not use GA optimization. The performances of the proposed algorithm and comparison models were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). Experimental result showed that the optimal adjusting coefficients for direct trust, indirect trust, direct distrust, indirect distrust were 0, 1.4287, 1.5, 0.4615 each. This implies that distrust relationships between users are more important than trust ones in recommender systems. From the perspective of recommendation accuracy, SNACF-GA (Avg. MAE = 0.111943), the proposed algorithm which reflects both direct and indirect trust / distrust relationships information, was found to greatly outperform a conventional CF (Avg. MAE = 0.112638). Also, the algorithm showed better recommendation accuracy than the SNACF (Avg. MAE = 0.112209). To confirm whether these differences are statistically significant or not, we applied paired samples t-test. The results from the paired samples t-test presented that the difference between SNACF-GA and conventional CF was statistical significant at the 1% significance level, and the difference between SNACF-GA and SNACF was statistical significant at the 5%. Our study found that the trust/distrust relationship can be important information for improving performance of recommendation algorithms. Especially, distrust relationship information was found to have a greater impact on the performance improvement of CF. This implies that we need to have more attention on distrust (negative) relationships rather than trust (positive) ones when tracking and managing social relationships between users.

• Journal of Korean Society for Atmospheric Environment
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.233-248
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• 2012

The national emission from energy sector accounted for 84.7% of all domestic emissions in 2007. Of the energy-use emissions, the emission from mobile source as one of key categories accounted for 19.4% and further the road transport emission occupied the most dominant portion in the category. The road transport emissions can be estimated on the basis of either the fuel consumed (Tier 1) or the distance travelled by the vehicle types and road types (higher Tiers). The latter approach must be suitable for simultaneously estimating $CO_2$, $CH_4$, and $N_2O$ emissions in local administrative districts. The objective of this study was to estimate 31 municipal GHG emissions from road transportation in Gyeonggi Province, Korea. In 2008, the municipalities were consisted of 2,014 towns expressed as Dong and Ri, the smallest administrative district unit. Since mobile sources are moving across other city and province borders, the emission estimated by fuel sold is in fact impossible to ensure consistency between neighbouring cities and provinces. On the other hand, the emission estimated by distance travelled is also impossible to acquire key activity data such as traffic volume, vehicle type and model, and road type in small towns. To solve the problem, we applied a hierarchical cluster analysis to separate town-by-town road patterns (clusters) based on a priori activity information including traffic volume, population, area, and branch road length obtained from small 151 towns. After identifying 10 road patterns, a rule building expert system was developed by visual basic application (VBA) to assort various unknown road patterns into one of 10 known patterns. The expert system was self-verified with original reference information and then objects in each homogeneous pattern were used to regress traffic volume based on the variables of population, area, and branch road length. The program was then applied to assign all the unknown towns into a known pattern and to automatically estimate traffic volumes by regression equations for each town. Further VKT (vehicle kilometer travelled) for each vehicle type in each town was calculated to be mapped by GIS (geological information system) and road transport emission on the corresponding road section was estimated by multiplying emission factors for each vehicle type. Finally all emissions from local branch roads in Gyeonggi Province could be estimated by summing up emissions from 1,902 towns where road information was registered. As a result of the study, the GHG average emission rate by the branch road transport was 6,101 kilotons of $CO_2$ equivalent per year (kt-$CO_2$ Eq/yr) and the total emissions from both main and branch roads was 24,152 kt-$CO_2$ Eq/yr in Gyeonggi Province. The ratio of branch roads emission to the total was 0.28 in 2008.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.107-120
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• 2014

This study proposes a novel recommender system using the structural hole analysis to reflect qualitative and emotional information in recommendation process. Although collaborative filtering (CF) is known as the most popular recommendation algorithm, it has some limitations including scalability and sparsity problems. The scalability problem arises when the volume of users and items become quite large. It means that CF cannot scale up due to large computation time for finding neighbors from the user-item matrix as the number of users and items increases in real-world e-commerce sites. Sparsity is a common problem of most recommender systems due to the fact that users generally evaluate only a small portion of the whole items. In addition, the cold-start problem is the special case of the sparsity problem when users or items newly added to the system with no ratings at all. When the user's preference evaluation data is sparse, two users or items are unlikely to have common ratings, and finally, CF will predict ratings using a very limited number of similar users. Moreover, it may produces biased recommendations because similarity weights may be estimated using only a small portion of rating data. In this study, we suggest a novel limitation of the conventional CF. The limitation is that CF does not consider qualitative and emotional information about users in the recommendation process because it only utilizes user's preference scores of the user-item matrix. To address this novel limitation, this study proposes cluster-indexing CF model with the structural hole analysis for recommendations. In general, the structural hole means a location which connects two separate actors without any redundant connections in the network. The actor who occupies the structural hole can easily access to non-redundant, various and fresh information. Therefore, the actor who occupies the structural hole may be a important person in the focal network and he or she may be the representative person in the focal subgroup in the network. Thus, his or her characteristics may represent the general characteristics of the users in the focal subgroup. In this sense, we can distinguish friends and strangers of the focal user utilizing the structural hole analysis. This study uses the structural hole analysis to select structural holes in subgroups as an initial seeds for a cluster analysis. First, we gather data about users' preference ratings for items and their social network information. For gathering research data, we develop a data collection system. Then, we perform structural hole analysis and find structural holes of social network. Next, we use these structural holes as cluster centroids for the clustering algorithm. Finally, this study makes recommendations using CF within user's cluster, and compare the recommendation performances of comparative models. For implementing experiments of the proposed model, we composite the experimental results from two experiments. The first experiment is the structural hole analysis. For the first one, this study employs a software package for the analysis of social network data - UCINET version 6. The second one is for performing modified clustering, and CF using the result of the cluster analysis. We develop an experimental system using VBA (Visual Basic for Application) of Microsoft Excel 2007 for the second one. This study designs to analyzing clustering based on a novel similarity measure - Pearson correlation between user preference rating vectors for the modified clustering experiment. In addition, this study uses 'all-but-one' approach for the CF experiment. In order to validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we apply three comparative types of CF models to the same dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the other comparative models. In especial, the proposed model significantly performs better than two comparative modes with the cluster analysis from the statistical significance test. However, the difference between the proposed model and the naive model does not have statistical significance.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.1-18
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• 2015

Collaborative filtering(CF) algorithm has been popularly used for recommender systems in both academic and practical applications. A general CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and creates recommendation results with the items favored by other people with similar tastes. Thus, it is very important for CF to measure the similarities between users because the recommendation quality depends on it. In most cases, users' explicit numeric ratings of items(i.e. quantitative information) have only been used to calculate the similarities between users in CF. However, several studies indicated that qualitative information such as user's reviews on the items may contribute to measure these similarities more accurately. Considering that a lot of people are likely to share their honest opinion on the items they purchased recently due to the advent of the Web 2.0, user's reviews can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, this study proposes a new hybrid recommender system that combines with users' review mining. Our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and his/her text reviews on the items when calculating similarities between users. In specific, our system creates not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-item review term matrix. Then, it calculates rating similarity and review similarity from each matrix, and calculates the final user-to-user similarity based on these two similarities(i.e. rating and review similarities). As the methods for calculating review similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is to use the frequency of the commonly used terms, and the other one is to use the sum of the importance weights of the commonly used terms in users' review. In the case of the importance weights of terms, we proposed the use of average TF-IDF(Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency) weights. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we applied it to the implementation of a recommender system for smartphone applications (hereafter, app). At present, over a million apps are offered in each app stores operated by Google and Apple. Due to this information overload, users have difficulty in selecting proper apps that they really want. Furthermore, app store operators like Google and Apple have cumulated huge amount of users' reviews on apps until now. Thus, we chose smartphone app stores as the application domain of our system. In order to collect the experimental data set, we built and operated a Web-based data collection system for about two weeks. As a result, we could obtain 1,246 valid responses(ratings and reviews) from 78 users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications(VBA) and SAS Text Miner. And, to avoid distortion due to human intervention, we did not adopt any refining works by human during the user's review mining process. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared its performance to the performance of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using average MAE(mean absolute error). The experimental results showed that our proposed system(MAE = 0.7867 ~ 0.7881) slightly outperformed a conventional CF system(MAE = 0.7939). Also, they showed that the calculation of review similarity between users based on the TF-IDF weights(MAE = 0.7867) leaded to better recommendation accuracy than the calculation based on the frequency of the commonly used terms in reviews(MAE = 0.7881). The results from paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system with review similarity calculation using the frequency of the commonly used terms outperformed conventional CF system with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of users' review information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.279-287
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• 2020

Recently, interest in radiation protection is increasing because of the occurrence of accidents related to exposure dose. So, the nuclear safety act provides to install the shields to avoid exceeding the dose limit. In particular, when the worker conducts the non-destructive testing (NDT) without the fixed shielding structure, we should monitor the access to the workplace based on a constant dose rate. However, when we apply for permits for NDT work in these work environments, the consideration factors to the estimation of the distance and exposure dose are not legally specified. Therefore, we developed the excel model that automatically calculates the distance, exposure dose, and cost if we input the factors. We applied the assumption data to this model. As a result of the application, the distance change rate was low when the thickness of the lead blanket and collimator is above 25 mm, 21.5 mm, respectively. However, we didn't consider the scattering and build-up factor. And, we assumed the shape of the lead blanket and collimator. Therefore, if we make up for these limitations and use the actual data, we expect that we can build a database on the distance and exposure dose.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.85-109
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• 2018

Recommender system recommends the items expected to be purchased by a customer in the future according to his or her previous purchase behaviors. It has been served as a tool for realizing one-to-one personalization for an e-commerce service company. Traditional recommender systems, especially the recommender systems based on collaborative filtering (CF), which is the most popular recommendation algorithm in both academy and industry, are designed to generate the items list for recommendation by using 'overall rating' - a single criterion. However, it has critical limitations in understanding the customers' preferences in detail. Recently, to mitigate these limitations, some leading e-commerce companies have begun to get feedback from their customers in a form of 'multicritera ratings'. Multicriteria ratings enable the companies to understand their customers' preferences from the multidimensional viewpoints. Moreover, it is easy to handle and analyze the multidimensional ratings because they are quantitative. But, the recommendation using multicritera ratings also has limitation that it may omit detail information on a user's preference because it only considers three-to-five predetermined criteria in most cases. Under this background, this study proposes a novel hybrid recommendation system, which selectively uses the results from 'traditional CF' and 'CF using multicriteria ratings'. Our proposed system is based on the premise that some people have holistic preference scheme, whereas others have composite preference scheme. Thus, our system is designed to use traditional CF using overall rating for the users with holistic preference, and to use CF using multicriteria ratings for the users with composite preference. To validate the usefulness of the proposed system, we applied it to a real-world dataset regarding the recommendation for POI (point-of-interests). Providing personalized POI recommendation is getting more attentions as the popularity of the location-based services such as Yelp and Foursquare increases. The dataset was collected from university students via a Web-based online survey system. Using the survey system, we collected the overall ratings as well as the ratings for each criterion for 48 POIs that are located near K university in Seoul, South Korea. The criteria include 'food or taste', 'price' and 'service or mood'. As a result, we obtain 2,878 valid ratings from 112 users. Among 48 items, 38 items (80%) are used as training dataset, and the remaining 10 items (20%) are used as validation dataset. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system (i.e. hybrid selective model), we compared its performance to the performances of two comparison models - the traditional CF and the CF with multicriteria ratings. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using two metrics - average MAE(mean absolute error) and precision-in-top-N. Precision-in-top-N represents the percentage of truly high overall ratings among those that the model predicted would be the N most relevant items for each user. The experimental system was developed using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The experimental results showed that our proposed system (avg. MAE = 0.584) outperformed traditional CF (avg. MAE = 0.591) as well as multicriteria CF (avg. AVE = 0.608). We also found that multicriteria CF showed worse performance compared to traditional CF in our data set, which is contradictory to the results in the most previous studies. This result supports the premise of our study that people have two different types of preference schemes - holistic and composite. Besides MAE, the proposed system outperformed all the comparison models in precision-in-top-3, precision-in-top-5, and precision-in-top-7. The results from the paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system outperformed traditional CF with 10% statistical significance level, and multicriteria CF with 1% statistical significance level from the perspective of average MAE. The proposed system sheds light on how to understand and utilize user's preference schemes in recommender systems domain.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.161-177
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• 2014

Corporate credit rating assessment consists of complicated processes in which various factors describing a company are taken into consideration. Such assessment is known to be very expensive since domain experts should be employed to assess the ratings. As a result, the data-driven corporate credit rating prediction using statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has received considerable attention from researchers and practitioners. In particular, statistical methods such as multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) and multinomial logistic regression analysis (MLOGIT), and AI methods including case-based reasoning (CBR), artificial neural network (ANN), and multiclass support vector machine (MSVM) have been applied to corporate credit rating.2) Among them, MSVM has recently become popular because of its robustness and high prediction accuracy. In this study, we propose a novel optimized MSVM model, and appy it to corporate credit rating prediction in order to enhance the accuracy. Our model, named 'GAMSVM (Genetic Algorithm-optimized Multiclass Support Vector Machine),' is designed to simultaneously optimize the kernel parameters and the feature subset selection. Prior studies like Lorena and de Carvalho (2008), and Chatterjee (2013) show that proper kernel parameters may improve the performance of MSVMs. Also, the results from the studies such as Shieh and Yang (2008) and Chatterjee (2013) imply that appropriate feature selection may lead to higher prediction accuracy. Based on these prior studies, we propose to apply GAMSVM to corporate credit rating prediction. As a tool for optimizing the kernel parameters and the feature subset selection, we suggest genetic algorithm (GA). GA is known as an efficient and effective search method that attempts to simulate the biological evolution phenomenon. By applying genetic operations such as selection, crossover, and mutation, it is designed to gradually improve the search results. Especially, mutation operator prevents GA from falling into the local optima, thus we can find the globally optimal or near-optimal solution using it. GA has popularly been applied to search optimal parameters or feature subset selections of AI techniques including MSVM. With these reasons, we also adopt GA as an optimization tool. To empirically validate the usefulness of GAMSVM, we applied it to a real-world case of credit rating in Korea. Our application is in bond rating, which is the most frequently studied area of credit rating for specific debt issues or other financial obligations. The experimental dataset was collected from a large credit rating company in South Korea. It contained 39 financial ratios of 1,295 companies in the manufacturing industry, and their credit ratings. Using various statistical methods including the one-way ANOVA and the stepwise MDA, we selected 14 financial ratios as the candidate independent variables. The dependent variable, i.e. credit rating, was labeled as four classes: 1(A1); 2(A2); 3(A3); 4(B and C). 80 percent of total data for each class was used for training, and remaining 20 percent was used for validation. And, to overcome small sample size, we applied five-fold cross validation to our dataset. In order to examine the competitiveness of the proposed model, we also experimented several comparative models including MDA, MLOGIT, CBR, ANN and MSVM. In case of MSVM, we adopted One-Against-One (OAO) and DAGSVM (Directed Acyclic Graph SVM) approaches because they are known to be the most accurate approaches among various MSVM approaches. GAMSVM was implemented using LIBSVM-an open-source software, and Evolver 5.5-a commercial software enables GA. Other comparative models were experimented using various statistical and AI packages such as SPSS for Windows, Neuroshell, and Microsoft Excel VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Experimental results showed that the proposed model-GAMSVM-outperformed all the competitive models. In addition, the model was found to use less independent variables, but to show higher accuracy. In our experiments, five variables such as X7 (total debt), X9 (sales per employee), X13 (years after founded), X15 (accumulated earning to total asset), and X39 (the index related to the cash flows from operating activity) were found to be the most important factors in predicting the corporate credit ratings. However, the values of the finally selected kernel parameters were found to be almost same among the data subsets. To examine whether the predictive performance of GAMSVM was significantly greater than those of other models, we used the McNemar test. As a result, we found that GAMSVM was better than MDA, MLOGIT, CBR, and ANN at the 1% significance level, and better than OAO and DAGSVM at the 5% significance level.