Product Recommendation Systems: A New Direction

This paper is about content-based product recommender systems. In product recommendation, a customer is presented with a selection of products from a product catalogue. Content-based approaches (in contradistinction to, e.g., collaborative approaches) select products by matching product descriptions from the catalogue with descriptions of customer preferences and requirements. We will refer to each product description as a case, , and we will refer to the product catalogue as a case base, CB. We assume a set of attributes, , and, for each , a projection function, , which obtains a value for the attribute from the case. For example, price returns the value of case ’s price attribute. This formulation, using projection functions, has the advantage of being agnostic about the actual underlying representation of the cases. They might, for example, be stored as tuples in a relational database, objects in an object-oriented database, or XML documents; all of these can support projection functions. It also allows the possibility of what one might call virtual attributes, where the value returned is not directly stored but is, instead, computed or inferred from what is stored. This is useful, for example, when the case base stores only ‘technical’ data (e.g. a car’s fuel-tank capacity, fuel consumption and top speed) but product selection requires ‘lifestyle’ attributes (e.g. the sportiness of the car). The projection functions for the lifestyle attributes would infer their values from the technical data. The values returned by a projection function will be of some particular type. For example, for a holiday case base, transport might have type train plane car coach ; season might have type Jan Feb Dec ; price might have some suitable set of numbers as its type. To simplify this paper, we will draw a distinction at this point between ordered types and unordered types. We will say that an ordered type is one that has a non-trivial partial order of its values that may be useful in product recommendation. price is an example: since its type is numeric, the values are ordered by the usual ordering of the numbers ( ).