Title
Recommendations Using Information from Multiple Association Rules: A Probabilistic Approach
Abstract
AbstractBusiness analytics has evolved from being a novelty used by a select few to an accepted facet of conducting business. Recommender systems form a critical component of the business analytics toolkit and, by enabling firms to effectively target customers with products and services, are helping alter the e-commerce landscape. A variety of methods exist for providing recommendations, with collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, and association-rule-based methods being the most common. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the quality of recommendations made using association rules. This is accomplished by combining rules when possible and stands apart from existing rule-combination methods in that it is strongly grounded in probability theory. Combining rules requires the identification of the best combination of rules from the many combinations that might exist, and we use a maximum-likelihood framework to compare alternative combinations. Because it is impractical to apply the maximum likelihood framework directly in real time, we show that this problem can equivalently be represented as a set partitioning problem by translating it into an information theoretic context-the best solution corresponds to the set of rules that leads to the highest sum of mutual information associated with the rules. Through a variety of experiments that evaluate the quality of recommendations made using the proposed approach, we show that i a greedy heuristic used to solve the maximum likelihood estimation problem is very effective, providing results comparable to those from using the optimal set partitioning solution; ii the recommendations made by our approach are more accurate than those made by a variety of state-of-the-art benchmarks, including collaborative filtering and matrix factorization; and iii the recommendations can be made in a fraction of a second on a desktop computer, making it practical to use in real-world applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1287/isre.2015.0583
Periodicals
Keywords
Field
DocType
personalization, Bayesian estimation, maximum likelihood, information theory, data analytics
Data mining,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Combining rules,Probabilistic logic,Marketing,Recommender system,Information theory,Collaborative filtering,Business analytics,Greedy algorithm,Association rule learning,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
26
3
1526-5536
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.42
29
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Abhijeet Ghoshal193.18
Syam Menon220712.58
Sumit Sarkar3835260.90