Beggars Can't Be Choosers: Augmenting Sparse Data for Embedding-Based Product Recommendations in Retail Stores

Recommender systems are an essential component in many e-commerce platforms to drive sales and guide customers when exploring new products. With the increasing adoption of RFID technology in traditional brick-and-mortar stores, for example, in the form of smart fitting rooms that allow to display recommendations in the integrated mirror, retailers have only recently started to tap into existing product recommendation algorithms. However, due to limited data availability as well as sparsity, for example due to assortments adapted for different demographics, traditional retailers largely struggle to leverage this technology. In this paper we extend the state-of-the-art embedding-based recommender approach prod2vec by processing information about co-purchased products (i.e., shopping baskets) in retail stores. By adding point-of-sale information to shopping baskets we are able to provide recommendations aimed at individual stores, without having to maintain separate models for each location. Furthermore, we experiment with data augmentation methods to overcome the imposed limitations of the available data, and are able to increase the quality of the computed recommendations by more than 6.9%.