A Meta-Heuristic Algorithm Approximating Optimized Recommendations for E-Commerce Business Promotions

Abstract

To provide personalized services such as online-product recommendations, it is usually necessary to model clickstream behavior of users if implicit preferences are taken into account. To accomplish this, web log mining is a promising approach that mines clickstream sessions and depicts frequent sequential paths that a customer follows while browsing e-commerce websites. Strong attributes are identified from the navigation behavior of users. These attributes reflect absolute preference (AP) of the customer towards a product viewed. The preferences are obtained only for the products clicked. These preferences are further refined by calculating the sequential preference (SP) of the user for the products. This paper proposes an intelligent recommender system known as SAPRS (sequential absolute preference-based recommender system) that embed these two approaches that are integrated to improve the quality of recommendation. The performance is evaluated using information retrieval methods. Extensive experiments were carried out to evaluate the proposed approach against state-of-the-art methods.