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Dual Path Model in Store Loyalty of Discount Store (대형마트 충성도의 이중경로모형)

  • Ji, Seong-Goo;Lee, Ihn-Goo
    • Journal of Distribution Research
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    • v.15 no.1
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    • pp.1-24
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    • 2010
  • I. Introduction The industry of domestic discount store was reorganized with 2 bigs and 1 middle, and then Home Plus took over Home Ever in 2008. In present, Oct, 2008, E-Mart has 118 outlets, Home Plus 112 outlets, and Lotte Mart 60 stores. With total number of 403 outlets, they are getting closer to a saturation point. We know that the industry of discount store has been getting through the mature stage in retail life cycle. There are many efforts to maintain existing customers rather than to get new customers. These competitions in this industry lead firms to acknowledge 'store loyalty' to be the first strategic tool for their sustainable competitiveness. In other words, the strategic goal of discount store is to boost up the repurchase rate of customers throughout increasing store loyalty. If owners of retail shops can figure out main factors for store loyalty, they can easily make more efficient and effective retail strategies which bring about more sales and profits. In this practical sense, there are many papers which are focusing on the antecedents of store loyalty. Many researchers have been inspecting causal relationships between antecedents and store loyalty; store characteristics, store image, atmosphere in store, sales promotion in store, service quality, customer characteristics, crowding, switching cost, trust, satisfaction, commitment, etc., In recent times, many academic researchers and practitioners have been interested in 'dual path model for service loyalty'. There are two paths in store loyalty. First path has an emphasis on symbolic and emotional dimension of service brand, and second path focuses on quality of product and service. We will call the former an extrinsic path and call the latter an intrinsic path. This means that consumers' cognitive path for store loyalty is not single but dual. Existing studies for dual path model are as follows; First, in extrinsic path, some papers in domestic settings show that there is 'store personality-identification-loyalty' path. Second, service quality has an effect on loyalty, which is a behavioral variable, in the mediation of customer satisfaction. But, it's very difficult to find out an empirical paper applied to domestic discount store based on this mediating model. The domestic research for store loyalty concentrates on not only intrinsic path but also extrinsic path. Relatively, an attention for intrinsic path is scarce. And then, we acknowledge that there should be a need for integrating extrinsic and intrinsic path. Also, in terms of retail industry, this study is meaningful because retailers want to achieve their competitiveness by using store loyalty. And so, the purpose of this paper is to integrate and complement two existing paths into one specific model, dual path model. This model includes both intrinsic and extrinsic path for store loyalty. With this research, we would expect to understand the full process of forming customers' store loyalty which had not been clearly explained. In other words, we propose the dual path model for discount store loyalty which has been originated from store personality and service quality. This model is composed of extrinsic path, discount store personality$\rightarrow$store identification$\rightarrow$store loyalty, and intrinsic path, service quality of discount store$\rightarrow$customer satisfaction$\rightarrow$store loyalty. II. Research Model Dual path model integrates intrinsic path and extrinsic path into one specific model. Intrinsic path put an emphasis on quality characteristics and extrinsic path focuses on brand characteristics. Intrinsic path is based on information processing perspective, and extrinsic path emphasizes symbolic and emotional dimension of brand. This model is composed of extrinsic path, discount store personality$\rightarrow$store identification$\rightarrow$store loyalty, and intrinsic path, service quality of discount store$\rightarrow$customer satisfaction$\rightarrow$store loyalty. Hypotheses are as follows; Hypothesis 1: Service quality perceived by customers in discount store has an positive effect on customer satisfaction Hypothesis 2: Store personality perceived by customers in discount store has an positive effect on store identification Hypothesis 3: Customer satisfaction in discount store has an positive effect on store loyalty. Hypothesis 4: Store identification has an positive effect on store loyalty. III. Results and Implications We examined consumers who patronize discount stores for samples of this study. With the structural equation model(SEM) analysis, we empirically tested the validity and fitness of the dual path model for store loyalty in discount stores. As results, the fitness indices of this model were well fitted to data obtained. In an intrinsic path, service quality(SQ) is positively related to customer satisfaction(CS), customer satisfaction(CS) has very significantly positive effect on store loyalty(SL). Also, in an extrinsic path, the store personality(SP) is positively related to store identification(SI), it shows significant effect on store loyalty. Table 1 shows the results as follows; There are some theoretical and practical implications. First, Many studies on discount store loyalty have been executed from various perspectives. But there has been no integrative view on this issue. And so, this research was theoretically designed to integrate various and controversial arguments into one systematic model. We empirically tested dual path model forming store loyalty, and brought up a systematic and integrative framework for future studies. We want to expect creative and aggressive research activities. Second, a few established papers are focused on the relationship between antecedents and store loyalty; store characteristics, atmosphere, sales promotion in store, service quality, trust, commitment, etc., There has been some limits in understanding thoroughly the formation process of store loyalty with a singular path, intrinsic or extrinsic. Beyond these limits in single path, we could propose the new path for store loyalty. This is meaningful. Third, discount store firms make and execute marketing strategies for increasing store loyalty. This research provides real practitioners with reference framework needed for actual strategy formation. Because this paper shows integrated and systematic path for store loyalty. A special feature of this study is to represent 6 sub dimensions of service quality in intrinsic path and 4 sub dimensions of store personality in extrinsic path. Marketers can make more analytic marketing planning with concrete sub dimensions of service quality and store personality. When marketers of discount stores make strategic planning like MPR, Ads, campaign, sales promotion, they can use many items which are more competitive than competitors.

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A Comparative Analysis of Social Commerce and Open Market Using User Reviews in Korean Mobile Commerce (사용자 리뷰를 통한 소셜커머스와 오픈마켓의 이용경험 비교분석)

  • Chae, Seung Hoon;Lim, Jay Ick;Kang, Juyoung
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.21 no.4
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    • pp.53-77
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    • 2015
  • Mobile commerce provides a convenient shopping experience in which users can buy products without the constraints of time and space. Mobile commerce has already set off a mega trend in Korea. The market size is estimated at approximately 15 trillion won (KRW) for 2015, thus far. In the Korean market, social commerce and open market are key components. Social commerce has an overwhelming open market in terms of the number of users in the Korean mobile commerce market. From the point of view of the industry, quick market entry, and content curation are considered to be the major success factors, reflecting the rapid growth of social commerce in the market. However, academics' empirical research and analysis to prove the success rate of social commerce is still insufficient. Henceforward, it is to be expected that social commerce and the open market in the Korean mobile commerce will compete intensively. So it is important to conduct an empirical analysis to prove the differences in user experience between social commerce and open market. This paper is an exploratory study that shows a comparative analysis of social commerce and the open market regarding user experience, which is based on the mobile users' reviews. Firstly, this study includes a collection of approximately 10,000 user reviews of social commerce and open market listed Google play. A collection of mobile user reviews were classified into topics, such as perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use through LDA topic modeling. Then, a sentimental analysis and co-occurrence analysis on the topics of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use was conducted. The study's results demonstrated that social commerce users have a more positive experience in terms of service usefulness and convenience versus open market in the mobile commerce market. Social commerce has provided positive user experiences to mobile users in terms of service areas, like 'delivery,' 'coupon,' and 'discount,' while open market has been faced with user complaints in terms of technical problems and inconveniences like 'login error,' 'view details,' and 'stoppage.' This result has shown that social commerce has a good performance in terms of user service experience, since the aggressive marketing campaign conducted and there have been investments in building logistics infrastructure. However, the open market still has mobile optimization problems, since the open market in mobile commerce still has not resolved user complaints and inconveniences from technical problems. This study presents an exploratory research method used to analyze user experience by utilizing an empirical approach to user reviews. In contrast to previous studies, which conducted surveys to analyze user experience, this study was conducted by using empirical analysis that incorporates user reviews for reflecting users' vivid and actual experiences. Specifically, by using an LDA topic model and TAM this study presents its methodology, which shows an analysis of user reviews that are effective due to the method of dividing user reviews into service areas and technical areas from a new perspective. The methodology of this study has not only proven the differences in user experience between social commerce and open market, but also has provided a deep understanding of user experience in Korean mobile commerce. In addition, the results of this study have important implications on social commerce and open market by proving that user insights can be utilized in establishing competitive and groundbreaking strategies in the market. The limitations and research direction for follow-up studies are as follows. In a follow-up study, it will be required to design a more elaborate technique of the text analysis. This study could not clearly refine the user reviews, even though the ones online have inherent typos and mistakes. This study has proven that the user reviews are an invaluable source to analyze user experience. The methodology of this study can be expected to further expand comparative research of services using user reviews. Even at this moment, users around the world are posting their reviews about service experiences after using the mobile game, commerce, and messenger applications.

Measuring the Economic Impact of Item Descriptions on Sales Performance (온라인 상품 판매 성과에 영향을 미치는 상품 소개글 효과 측정 기법)

  • Lee, Dongwon;Park, Sung-Hyuk;Moon, Songchun
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.1-17
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    • 2012
  • Personalized smart devices such as smartphones and smart pads are widely used. Unlike traditional feature phones, theses smart devices allow users to choose a variety of functions, which support not only daily experiences but also business operations. Actually, there exist a huge number of applications accessible by smart device users in online and mobile application markets. Users can choose apps that fit their own tastes and needs, which is impossible for conventional phone users. With the increase in app demand, the tastes and needs of app users are becoming more diverse. To meet these requirements, numerous apps with diverse functions are being released on the market, which leads to fierce competition. Unlike offline markets, online markets have a limitation in that purchasing decisions should be made without experiencing the items. Therefore, online customers rely more on item-related information that can be seen on the item page in which online markets commonly provide details about each item. Customers can feel confident about the quality of an item through the online information and decide whether to purchase it. The same is true of online app markets. To win the sales competition against other apps that perform similar functions, app developers need to focus on writing app descriptions to attract the attention of customers. If we can measure the effect of app descriptions on sales without regard to the app's price and quality, app descriptions that facilitate the sale of apps can be identified. This study intends to provide such a quantitative result for app developers who want to promote the sales of their apps. For this purpose, we collected app details including the descriptions written in Korean from one of the largest app markets in Korea, and then extracted keywords from the descriptions. Next, the impact of the keywords on sales performance was measured through our econometric model. Through this analysis, we were able to analyze the impact of each keyword itself, apart from that of the design or quality. The keywords, comprised of the attribute and evaluation of each app, are extracted by a morpheme analyzer. Our model with the keywords as its input variables was established to analyze their impact on sales performance. A regression analysis was conducted for each category in which apps are included. This analysis was required because we found the keywords, which are emphasized in app descriptions, different category-by-category. The analysis conducted not only for free apps but also for paid apps showed which keywords have more impact on sales performance for each type of app. In the analysis of paid apps in the education category, keywords such as 'search+easy' and 'words+abundant' showed higher effectiveness. In the same category, free apps whose keywords emphasize the quality of apps showed higher sales performance. One interesting fact is that keywords describing not only the app but also the need for the app have asignificant impact. Language learning apps, regardless of whether they are sold free or paid, showed higher sales performance by including the keywords 'foreign language study+important'. This result shows that motivation for the purchase affected sales. While item reviews are widely researched in online markets, item descriptions are not very actively studied. In the case of the mobile app markets, newly introduced apps may not have many item reviews because of the low quantity sold. In such cases, item descriptions can be regarded more important when customers make a decision about purchasing items. This study is the first trial to quantitatively analyze the relationship between an item description and its impact on sales performance. The results show that our research framework successfully provides a list of the most effective sales key terms with the estimates of their effectiveness. Although this study is performed for a specified type of item (i.e., mobile apps), our model can be applied to almost all of the items traded in online markets.

A Study on the Effect of Using Sentiment Lexicon in Opinion Classification (오피니언 분류의 감성사전 활용효과에 대한 연구)

  • Kim, Seungwoo;Kim, Namgyu
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.20 no.1
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    • pp.133-148
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    • 2014
  • Recently, with the advent of various information channels, the number of has continued to grow. The main cause of this phenomenon can be found in the significant increase of unstructured data, as the use of smart devices enables users to create data in the form of text, audio, images, and video. In various types of unstructured data, the user's opinion and a variety of information is clearly expressed in text data such as news, reports, papers, and various articles. Thus, active attempts have been made to create new value by analyzing these texts. The representative techniques used in text analysis are text mining and opinion mining. These share certain important characteristics; for example, they not only use text documents as input data, but also use many natural language processing techniques such as filtering and parsing. Therefore, opinion mining is usually recognized as a sub-concept of text mining, or, in many cases, the two terms are used interchangeably in the literature. Suppose that the purpose of a certain classification analysis is to predict a positive or negative opinion contained in some documents. If we focus on the classification process, the analysis can be regarded as a traditional text mining case. However, if we observe that the target of the analysis is a positive or negative opinion, the analysis can be regarded as a typical example of opinion mining. In other words, two methods (i.e., text mining and opinion mining) are available for opinion classification. Thus, in order to distinguish between the two, a precise definition of each method is needed. In this paper, we found that it is very difficult to distinguish between the two methods clearly with respect to the purpose of analysis and the type of results. We conclude that the most definitive criterion to distinguish text mining from opinion mining is whether an analysis utilizes any kind of sentiment lexicon. We first established two prediction models, one based on opinion mining and the other on text mining. Next, we compared the main processes used by the two prediction models. Finally, we compared their prediction accuracy. We then analyzed 2,000 movie reviews. The results revealed that the prediction model based on opinion mining showed higher average prediction accuracy compared to the text mining model. Moreover, in the lift chart generated by the opinion mining based model, the prediction accuracy for the documents with strong certainty was higher than that for the documents with weak certainty. Most of all, opinion mining has a meaningful advantage in that it can reduce learning time dramatically, because a sentiment lexicon generated once can be reused in a similar application domain. Additionally, the classification results can be clearly explained by using a sentiment lexicon. This study has two limitations. First, the results of the experiments cannot be generalized, mainly because the experiment is limited to a small number of movie reviews. Additionally, various parameters in the parsing and filtering steps of the text mining may have affected the accuracy of the prediction models. However, this research contributes a performance and comparison of text mining analysis and opinion mining analysis for opinion classification. In future research, a more precise evaluation of the two methods should be made through intensive experiments.

A Compartive Study on the Overseas Business Activity of Insurance Companies in Korea and Germany - a Case of German Legal Expenses Insurance Company - (한국 및 독일 보험회사의 해외 진출 모델 비교 연구 -독일 법률비용보험회사의 사례를 중심으로-)

  • Shin, Dong-Ho
    • Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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    • v.11 no.8
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    • pp.2876-2881
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    • 2010
  • This paper attempts to find out implications based on the comparative analysis of overseas expansion model between the Korean insurance companies and the German one. There are three types of the strategies of the overseas-expansion-model of insurer, i.e. customer-oriented localized strategy, niche market-oriented strategy, and growing market-oriented strategy. From the review of related literatures and through an interview conducted by the insurance specialist, the findings are some differences between Korean and German insurance companies, when they go into foreign insurance markets. Th significant differences between Korean and German insurers are a customer oriented localized strategy and niche market oriented strategy. The Korean insurer shows a strength on the overseas-expansion-strategy, but the most clients of the Korean insurer on overseas markets are also Korean companies and Korean immigrants. The Korean legal expenses insurance market is yet in its embryonic stage, while the German legal expenses insurance company is pushing ahead with a strategy focused on localization and niche market on the legal expenses insurance product. In conclusion, like a case of the German legal expenses insurance company, the Korean insurer needs a customer oriented localized strategy as well as a niche market oriented strategy on the overseas insurance market.

The Dynamics of Noise and Vibration Engineering Vibrant as ever, for years to come

  • Leuridan, Jan
    • Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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    • 2010.05a
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    • pp.47-47
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    • 2010
  • Over the past 20 years, constant progress in noise and vibration (NVH) engineering has enabled to constantly advance quality and comfort of operation and use of really any products - from automobiles to aircraft, to all kinds of industrial vehicles and machines - to the extend that for many products, supreme NVH performance has becomes part of its brand image in the market. At the same time, the product innovation agenda in the automotive, aircraft and really many other industries, has been extended very much in recent years by meeting ever more strict environmental regulations. Like in the automotive industry, the drive towards meeting emission and CO2 targets leads to very much accelerated adoption of new powertrain concepts (downsizing of ICE, hybrid-electrical...), and to new vehicle architectures and the application of new materials to reduce weight, which bring new challenges for not only maintaining but further improving NVH performance. This drives for innovation in NVH engineering, so as to succeed in meeting a product brand performance for NVH, while as the same time satisfying eco-constraints. Product innovation has also become increasingly dependent on the adoption of electronics and software, which drives for new solutions for NVH engineering that can be applied for NVH performance optimization of mechatronic products. Finally, relentless pressure to shorten time to market while maintaining overall product quality and reliability, mandates that the practice and solutions for NVH engineering can be optimally applied in all phases of product development. The presentation will first review the afore trends for product and process innovation, and discuss the challenges they represent for NVH engineering. Next, the presentation discusses new solutions for NVH engineering of products, so as to meet target brand values, while at the same time meeting ever more strict eco constraints, and this within a context of increasing adoption of electronics and controls to drive product innovation. NVH being very much defined by system level performance, these solutions implement the approach of "Model Based System Engineering" to increase the impact of system level analysis for NVH in all phases of product development: - At the Concept Phase, to be able to do business case analysis of new product concepts; to arrive at an optimized and robust product architecture (e.g. to hybrid powertrain lay-out, to optimize fuel economy); to enable target cascading, to subsystem and component level. - In Development Phase, to increase realism and productivity of simulation, so as to frontload virtual validation of components and subsystems and to further reduce reliance on physical testing. - During the final System Testing Phase, to enable subsystem testing by a combination of physical testing and simulation: using simulation models to simulate the final integration context when testing a subsystem, enabling to frontload subsystem testing before final system integration is possible. - To interconnect Mechanical, Electronical and Controls engineering, in all phases of development, by supporting model driven controls engineering (MIL, SIL, HIL). Finally, the presentation reviews examples of how LMS is implementing such new applications for NVH engineering with lead customers in Europe, Asia and US, with demonstrated benefits both in terms of shortening development cycles, and/or enabling a simulation based approach to reduce reliance on physical testing.

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An Analysis on the pass-through of Korean export prices of Exchange rate changes (글로벌 금융위기 이후 환률변동과 수출가격)

  • Choi, Chang-Yeoul;Ham, Hyung-Bum
    • International Commerce and Information Review
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    • v.13 no.4
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    • pp.229-249
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    • 2011
  • The exchange rate change has been increased since the time when the floating exchange rate system was introduced in Korea. As a result, the increase of the exchange rate changes raised the risk in international trades in Korea. Also after Bretton Woods System broke down, the increasing exchange rate fluctuation raised the risk in international trade. The purpose of this dissertation is to study whether this incomplete pass-through exists in Korean export industry and furthermore to measure the markup rate of the export price using real data since Global Financial Crisis. The estimation results of the export price determination model by Error Correction Model shows that the export price of Korea has been greatly influenced by the export prices and exchange rates against U.S. Dollar of rival countries, domestic producer price as well as the Korean Won-U.S. Dollar exchange rate and also business coincidence index of U.S. in demand. Particularly, the pass-through rate of Korean Won-U.S. Dollar exchange rate to export price is estimated to be incomplete, which contrasts with the propositions of traditional exchange rate determination approach, e. g. elasticity approach, monetary approach, etc.

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Probability Map of Migratory Bird Habitat for Rational Management of Conservation Areas - Focusing on Busan Eco Delta City (EDC) - (보존지역의 합리적 관리를 위한 철새 서식 확률지도 구축 - 부산 Eco Delta City (EDC)를 중심으로 -)

  • Kim, Geun Han;Kong, Seok Jun;Kim, Hee Nyun;Koo, Kyung Ah
    • Journal of the Korean Society of Environmental Restoration Technology
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    • v.26 no.6
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    • pp.67-84
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    • 2023
  • In some areas of the Republic of Korea, the designation and management of conservation areas do not adequately reflect regional characteristics and often impose behavioral regulations without considering the local context. One prominent example is the Busan EDC area. As a result, conflicts may arise, including large-scale civil complaints, regarding the conservation and utilization of these areas. Therefore, for the efficient designation and management of protected areas, it is necessary to consider various ecosystem factors, changes in land use, and regional characteristics. In this study, we specifically focused on the Busan EDC area and applied machine learning techniques to analyze the habitat of regional species. Additionally, we employed Explainable Artificial Intelligence techniques to interpret the results of our analysis. To analyze the regional characteristics of the waterfront area in the Busan EDC district and the habitat of migratory birds, we used bird observations as dependent variables, distinguishing between presence and absence. The independent variables were constructed using land cover, elevation, slope, bridges, and river depth data. We utilized the XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) model, known for its excellent performance in various fields, to predict the habitat probabilities of 11 bird species. Furthermore, we employed the SHapley Additive exPlanations technique, one of the representative methodologies of XAI, to analyze the relative importance and impact of the variables used in the model. The analysis results showed that in the EDC business district, as one moves closer to the river from the waterfront, the likelihood of bird habitat increases based on the overlapping habitat probabilities of the analyzed bird species. By synthesizing the major variables influencing the habitat of each species, key variables such as rivers, rice fields, fields, pastures, inland wetlands, tidal flats, orchards, cultivated lands, cliffs & rocks, elevation, lakes, and deciduous forests were identified as areas that can serve as habitats, shelters, resting places, and feeding grounds for birds. On the other hand, artificial structures such as bridges, railways, and other public facilities were found to have a negative impact on bird habitat. The development of a management plan for conservation areas based on the objective analysis presented in this study is expected to be extensively utilized in the future. It will provide diverse evidential materials for establishing effective conservation area management strategies.

Recommender Systems using Structural Hole and Collaborative Filtering (구조적 공백과 협업필터링을 이용한 추천시스템)

  • Kim, Mingun;Kim, Kyoung-Jae
    • 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.

Predicting the Performance of Recommender Systems through Social Network Analysis and Artificial Neural Network (사회연결망분석과 인공신경망을 이용한 추천시스템 성능 예측)

  • Cho, Yoon-Ho;Kim, In-Hwan
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.16 no.4
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    • pp.159-172
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    • 2010
  • The recommender system is one of the possible solutions to assist customers in finding the items they would like to purchase. To date, a variety of recommendation techniques have been developed. One of the most successful recommendation techniques is Collaborative Filtering (CF) that has been used in a number of different applications such as recommending Web pages, movies, music, articles and products. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. Broadly, there are memory-based CF algorithms, model-based CF algorithms, and hybrid CF algorithms which combine CF with content-based techniques or other recommender systems. While many researchers have focused their efforts in improving CF performance, the theoretical justification of CF algorithms is lacking. That is, we do not know many things about how CF is done. Furthermore, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting the performances of CF algorithms in advance is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose an efficient approach to predict the performance of CF. Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are applied to develop our prediction model. CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. SNA facilitates an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in data for CF recommendations. An ANN model is developed through an analysis of network topology, such as network density, inclusiveness, clustering coefficient, network centralization, and Krackhardt's efficiency. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Inclusiveness refers to the number of nodes which are included within the various connected parts of the social network. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. Krackhardt's efficiency characterizes how dense the social network is beyond that barely needed to keep the social group even indirectly connected to one another. We use these social network measures as input variables of the ANN model. As an output variable, we use the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the ANN model, sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well-known department stores in Korea, was used. Total 396 experimental samples were gathered, and we used 40%, 40%, and 20% of them, for training, test, and validation, respectively. The 5-fold cross validation was also conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. The input variable measuring process consists of following three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used Net Miner 3 and UCINET 6.0 for SNA, and Clementine 11.1 for ANN modeling. The experiments reported that the ANN model has 92.61% estimated accuracy and 0.0049 RMSE. Thus, we can know that our prediction model helps decide whether CF is useful for a given application with certain data characteristics.