전자상거래 개인화 추천을 위한 상품 카테고리 중립적 사용자 프로파일링

초록

Collaborative filtering is one of the popular techniques for personalized recommendation in e-commerce. In collaborative filtering, user profiles are usually managed per product category in order to reduce data sparsity. Product diversification of Internet storefronts and multiple product category sales of e-commerce portals require cross-product category usage of user profiles in order to overcome the cold start problem of collaborative filtering. In this paper, we study the feasibility of cross-product category usage of user profiles, and suggest a method to improve recommendation performance of cross-product category user profiling. First, we investigate whether user profiles on a product category can be used to recommend products in other product categories. Furthermore, a way of utilizing user profiles selectively is suggested to increase recommendation performance of cross-product category user profiling. The feasibility of cross-product category user profiling and the usefulness of the proposed method are tested with real click stream data of an Internet storefront which sells multiple product categories including books, music CDs, and DVDs. The experiment results show that user profiles on a product category can be used to recommend products in other product categories. Also, the selective usage of user profiles based on correlations between subcategories of two product categories provides better performance than the whole usage of user profiles.

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