Improvement of a Product Recommendation Model using Customers' Search Patterns and Product Details

Abstract

[Abstract] In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation model based on Doc2vec using search keywords and product details. Until now, a lot of prior studies on recommender systems have proposed collaborative filtering (CF) as the main algorithm for recommendation, which uses only structured input data such as customers’ purchase history or ratings. However, the use of unstructured data like online customer review in CF may lead to better recommendation. Under this background, we propose to use search keyword data and product detail information, which are seldom used in previous studies, for product recommendation. The proposed model makes recommendation by using CF which simultaneously considers ratings, search keywords and detailed information of the products purchased by customers. To extract quantitative patterns from these unstructured data, Doc2vec is applied. As a result of the experiment, the proposed model was found to outperform the conventional recommendation model. In addition, it was confirmed that search keywords and product details had a significant effect on recommendation. This study has academic significance in that it tries to apply the customers' online behavior information to the recommendation system and that it mitigates the cold start problem, which is one of the critical limitations of CF.