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Recommendations Using Information from Multiple Association Rules: A Probabilistic Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Abhijeet Ghoshal

    (College of Business, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky 40292)

  • Syam Menon

    (Naveen Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080)

  • Sumit Sarkar

    (Naveen Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080)

Abstract

Business 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Abhijeet Ghoshal & Syam Menon & Sumit Sarkar, 2015. "Recommendations Using Information from Multiple Association Rules: A Probabilistic Approach," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 26(3), pages 532-551, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orisre:v:26:y:2015:i:3:p:532-551
    DOI: 10.1287/isre.2015.0583
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Kartik Hosanagar & Daniel Fleder & Dokyun Lee & Andreas Buja, 2014. "Will the Global Village Fracture Into Tribes? Recommender Systems and Their Effects on Consumer Fragmentation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 60(4), pages 805-823, April.
    2. Ozlem Ergun & Gultekin Kuyzu & Martin Savelsbergh, 2007. "Reducing Truckload Transportation Costs Through Collaboration," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 41(2), pages 206-221, May.
    3. Gediminas Adomavicius & Alexander Tuzhilin & Rong Zheng, 2011. "REQUEST: A Query Language for Customizing Recommendations," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 22(1), pages 99-117, March.
    4. Gerald Häubl & Valerie Trifts, 2000. "Consumer Decision Making in Online Shopping Environments: The Effects of Interactive Decision Aids," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 19(1), pages 4-21, May.
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    Cited by:

    1. Jiawei Chen & Yinghui (Catherine) Yang & Hongyan Liu, 2021. "Mining Bilateral Reviews for Online Transaction Prediction: A Relational Topic Modeling Approach," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 32(2), pages 541-560, June.
    2. Qian Wang & Jijun Yu & Weiwei Deng, 2019. "An adjustable re-ranking approach for improving the individual and aggregate diversities of product recommendations," Electronic Commerce Research, Springer, vol. 19(1), pages 59-79, March.
    3. Bae, Joonho & Park, Jinkyoo & Choi, Jeonghye & Bum Soh, Seung, 2023. "A recommending system for mobile games using the dynamic nonparametric model," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).

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