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

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

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.23 no.4
• /
• pp.77-110
• /
• 2017

Recently, the diversification and individualization of consumption patterns through the web and mobile devices based on the Internet have been rapid. As this happens, the efficient operation of the offline store, which is a traditional distribution channel, has become more important. In order to raise both the sales and profits of stores, stores need to supply and sell the most attractive products to consumers in a timely manner. However, there is a lack of research on which SKUs, out of many products, can increase sales probability and reduce inventory costs. In particular, if a company sells products through multiple in-store stores across multiple locations, it would be helpful to increase sales and profitability of stores if SKUs appealing to customers are recommended. In this study, the recommender system (recommender system such as collaborative filtering and hybrid filtering), which has been used for personalization recommendation, is suggested by SKU recommendation method of a store unit of a distribution company that handles a homogeneous brand through a plurality of sales stores by country and region. We calculated the similarity of each store by using the purchase data of each store's handling items, filtering the collaboration according to the sales history of each store by each SKU, and finally recommending the individual SKU to the store. In addition, the store is classified into four clusters through PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and cluster analysis (Clustering) using the store profile data. The recommendation system is implemented by the hybrid filtering method that applies the collaborative filtering in each cluster and measured the performance of both methods based on actual sales data. Most of the existing recommendation systems have been studied by recommending items such as movies and music to the users. In practice, industrial applications have also become popular. In the meantime, there has been little research on recommending SKUs for each store by applying these recommendation systems, which have been mainly dealt with in the field of personalization services, to the store units of distributors handling similar brands. If the recommendation method of the existing recommendation methodology was 'the individual field', this study expanded the scope of the store beyond the individual domain through a plurality of sales stores by country and region and dealt with the store unit of the distribution company handling the same brand SKU while suggesting a recommendation method. In addition, if the existing recommendation system is limited to online, it is recommended to apply the data mining technique to develop an algorithm suitable for expanding to the store area rather than expanding the utilization range offline and analyzing based on the existing individual. The significance of the results of this study is that the personalization recommendation algorithm is applied to a plurality of sales outlets handling the same brand. A meaningful result is derived and a concrete methodology that can be constructed and used as a system for actual companies is proposed. It is also meaningful that this is the first attempt to expand the research area of the academic field related to the existing recommendation system, which was focused on the personalization domain, to a sales store of a company handling the same brand. From 05 to 03 in 2014, the number of stores' sales volume of the top 100 SKUs are limited to 52 SKUs by collaborative filtering and the hybrid filtering method SKU recommended. We compared the performance of the two recommendation methods by totaling the sales results. The reason for comparing the two recommendation methods is that the recommendation method of this study is defined as the reference model in which offline collaborative filtering is applied to demonstrate higher performance than the existing recommendation method. The results of this model are compared with the Hybrid filtering method, which is a model that reflects the characteristics of the offline store view. The proposed method showed a higher performance than the existing recommendation method. The proposed method was proved by using actual sales data of large Korean apparel companies. In this study, we propose a method to extend the recommendation system of the individual level to the group level and to efficiently approach it. In addition to the theoretical framework, which is of great value.