Importance-Performance Analysis of Product Attributes Using Explainable Deep Neural Network From Online Reviews

Importance-performance analysis (IPA) is a technique used to understand customer satisfaction and improve the quality of product attributes. This study proposes an explainable deep-neural-network-based method to carry out IPA of product attributes from online reviews for product design. Previous works used shallow neural network (SNN)-based methods to estimate importance values, but it was unclear whether the SNN is an optimal neural network architecture. The estimated importance has high variability by a single neural network from a training set that is randomly selected. However, the proposed method provides importance values with a lower variance by improving the importance estimation of each product attribute in the IPA. The proposed method first identifies the product attributes and estimates their performance. Then, it infers the importance values by combining explanations of the input features from multiple optimal neural networks. A case study on smartphones is used herein to demonstrate the proposed method.