Eighth ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing
Building Personalized Recommendation System in E-commerce Using
Association Rule-based Mining and Classification
Zhang Xizheng
Department of Computer Science, Hunan Institute of Engineering, Xiangtan,China,411104
Z_X_Z2000@263.net
Abstract
Due to the convenience of Internet, people can
search for whatever information they need and buy
whatever they want on the web. In the age of E-
Commerce, it is difficult to provide support for
customers to find the most valuable products that
match their heterogeneous needs. Traditional appro-
aches to this so-called personalization problem adopt
pre-defined formats to describe the customer
requirements. This always leads to distortion in
eliciting requirement information and thus inaccurate
recommendations. In this paper,we propose a
personalized recommendation system using association
rule mining and classification in e-commerce.
Customer requirements are extracted from text
documents and transformed into a set of significant
phrases. Allowing the transformed transaction records,
a set of association rule are mined from database using
Apriori algorithm. CBA-CB algorithm is applied to
produce the best rules out of the whole set of rules. The
best classifiers are then generated after the test and
validation of those rules, aimed to predict the item
labels for new customer requirements and thus assigns
the corresponding class labels to the customer. The
system analysis and design of the proposed
recommendation system as well as the implementation
of prototype are also presented.
1. Introduction
The advent of the E-Commerce induced by the rapid
development of Internet and the accompanying
adoption of the Web has deeply promoted the chances
to create greater business opportunities and to reach
customers more easily.This 24*7 online accessibility
has resulted in the enlargement of choices, but
customers are now faced with information over-
load.Their own arduous efforts are required to retrieve
information that matches their preferences.What is
needed is an automated and sophisticated recommen-
0-7695-2909-7/07 $25.00 © 2007 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/SNPD.2007.548
dation system to suggest personalized information in a
brief form without going through an annoying
process.Diverse recommendation systems have been
proposed for different businesses to solve the person-
alization problem by guiding customers to find the
products they would like to purchase[1][2].
Mooney had presented one of the earliest
recommendation systems. It is a mail filtering system
that allows its members to annotate each document in
detail to represent how interesting the reader found the
document.Based on this work, several automated
recommendation systems have been developed.
Most of them are based on either content filtering or
collaborative filtering. However, both of the two
paradigms yielded few promising results.The content-
based filtering (CBF) approach recommends products
to target customers according to the preferences of their
neighbors. However, it is often inhibitive to estimate
the preference similarities between various
customers.The collaborative filtering (CF) approach,
on the other hand, recommends products to object
customers based on their past preferences. When
dealing with new customers, this type of recom-
mendation systems cannot recommend any product as
no historical preference records are available.
Nevertheless, both approaches require the customers to
express their requirements according to certain system
pre-defined formats, and thus real customer require-
ment information may be distorted[3][4].
Due to the disadvangtages of traditional approaches,
a new paradigm is preferred to recommendate proper
products by capturing accurately individual require-
ment information. The main difficulties in establishing
personalized recommendation systems can be
manifested in two aspects[8]. First, customers require-
ments expressed in their own natural languages are
normally qualitative and tend to be either imprecise or
ambiguous. It’s difficult in understanding the require-
ments expression. Second, relational data-oriented
classification methods,which commonly used on
structured data to predict the unknown class label of
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object product,cannot be adopted to classify customer
requirements which are organized into a set of text-
based documents.
In this paper,we propose a personalized recom-
mendation system using association rule mining and
classification in e-commerce. Customer requirements
are extracted from text documents and transformed into
a set of significant phrases. Allowing the transformed
transaction records, a set of association rule are mined
from database using Apriori algorithm. To enable the
timely and accurate responses, CBA-CB algorithm is
applied to produce the best rules out of the whole set of
rules. The best classifiers are then built after the test
and validation of those rules. These classifiers are
utilized to predict the item labels for new customer
requirements and thus assigns the corresponding class
labels to the customer. The system analysis and design
of the proposed recommendation system as well as the
prototype implementation are also presented.
2.Recommendation Problem Outline
Recommendation system is facing the problem to
help customer find the items he would like to purchase
at e-commerce sites.After having received simple
descriptions about the appearance, color, price,
specification of certain item, recommendation system
will show the according items which satifies all the
above requirements. Customer requirements can be
described as a set of phrases, P := { p1, p 2, , pM } ,
and item labels denoted by L = {l1, l 2, , lN} .Each
entity of L representing a specific class of product. For
general, suppose there are sales records for K
customers, C = {ci | ∀i = 1, , K } ,and their sales records
compose the transaction database T . Every transaction
record comprises the customer requirement record and
the purchased item record as Equation (1)
t (ci ) |= {P(ci ), L(ci) | ∀i = 1, 2, , K } (1)
For each customer c i ( i = 1, 2, , K )in the
transaction database T , the requirement record is
described as a set of phrases, P(ci ) ,where P(ci) ⊆ P .
The according purchased item record indicates a class
label L(ci) to show which item he purchased.
Consider recommendation system with K′ new
object customers,whose object class labels are
unknown. The object customers compose an object
database O , where O = {oj}K ′ . For each customer
j ( j = 1, 2, , K ′) in the object database, the require-
o English are adopted to reduce the dimensions of the
ment record is described as a set of phrases, P j ,
o
where P o j ⊆ P and P j ≠ P ci . Thus, the recom-
mendation problem based on customer requirements is
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o
formalized as P j ⇒ L(oj ) , where an association
rule, ⇒ , indicates an inference from the customer
o
requirements P j to the class label lj = l (cj )
3. Recommendation System
The framework of such a recommendation system is
illustrated as Fig.1. The system comprises four
consecutive stages, namely the requirement extraction
module, association rule generation module, classi-
fication module, and system performance validation
module. First, historical requirement data are selected
and transformed into proper phrase datasets. Data
mining procdure then starts to search for a set of
associated, frequently occurring phrase patterns
(classifiers). The generated classifiers are pruned by
which only those classifiers with good quality are kept
for recommendations. When new requirement
information comes, the system identifies the corre-
sponding class labels using multiple classifiers. Finally,
the performance of the whole system is validated to
evaluate how accurately the system will give
recommendations.
Figure 1. Framework of recommendation
system.
3.1. Requirement extraction
Customer requirements are usually expressed by
natural languages where many common words occur
which contribute nothing to information retrie- val
.These common words should be filtered out. On the
other hand, a group of different words may share the
same word stem. To reduce variations in words and
increase the scope of searches, these words should be
transformed into their canonical forms. In this regard,
stemming algorithm and a common stopword list in
text documents, further improve the efficiency of the
classifier extraction[5][6][10].To extract the require-
ment information, semantic analysis is adopted. Four
thesaurus collections are used to match the
requirements.They are represented as N = {n1, n 2, } ,
V = {v1, v2, } , ADJ = {adj1, adj2, } , ADV ={adv1, adv2, }
for noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, respectively.
Semantic rules obtained based on above approach are
represented as IF–THEN rule formats and stored in the
semantic rule database to indicate the inference
relationship between requirements and predefined
phrases.After extraction,customer requirements are
acquired and represented as a set of phrases which are
utilized in the following module to build the classifiers.
3.2. Association rule mining
Association rule mining technique is aiming at
discovering the relationships among a large set of data
items[7][8]. Let η = {i1, i 2, , ix , , iy, , im} be a set
of items, and T a set of database transactions, where
T = {t1, t 2, , tQ} . Each transaction tq (1 ≤ q ≤ Q) com-
prises a set of items and a assigned unique identifier. A
transaction tq is said to contain ix when ix ⊆ tq . As
the association rule learning method excels in finding
the complex relationships among a huge number of
semior non-structured items, it is adopted here to
acquire the rules.An association rule is an implication
of the form ix ⇒ iy , where ix ⊆ P and iy ⊆ C as well
as ix ∩ iy = ∅ corresponding to requirement phrases and
class labels, respectively. The rule ix ⇒ iy in the
transaction set T holds the support s % and the
confidence c% , where s % is the probability
P (ix ∩ iy ) that ix and iy hold together among all the
transactions and c% is the conditional proba-
bility P (iy ix ) that iy is true under the condition of ix .
In a general form, the mined association rules are
represented as the following:
a1 AND a2 AND AND aH ⇒b with Support = s%;Confidence = c%
where phrase as = pi ⊆ P and 1 ≤ s ≤ H ,1 ≤ i ≤ M , class
label b = lj ⊆ L,1 ≤ j ≤ N ; and for any two elements in
the precedence, ax and a y , where 1 ≤ x, y ≤ H and
x ≠ y, ax ∩ ay = ∅ ; s% and c% refer to the support
and confidence levels for this rule, respectively. They
are calculated as Equation (2) and (3) , respectively.
count (a1 AND a 2 AND AND aH AND b)
s% = ×100% (2)
count (T )
count (a1 AND a2 AND AND aH AND b)
c% = ×100% (3)
count (a1 AND a2 AND AND aH )
where count (a1 AND a 2 AND AND aH AND b) is
the number of transaction records in database T
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containing all items a1, a 2, and aH , as well as b ;
count(T) is the total number of data records contained
in T ;In addition, the set {a1, a 2, , aH } embodies a
non-empty subset of P , whereas the set {b} exhibits a
non-empty subset of L .
Apriori algorithm is adopted to acquire the classifi-
ers[9].After all the frequent itemsets are discovered,
association rules can be generated with the correspon-
ding support and confidence levels. Thus,classifiers are
built using association rule learning.
3.3. Classification of rules
Before classifers generated in subsection 3.2 can be
utilized to classify the rules, a process called pruning
is done. By reason of acquiring the timely and accurate
responses, pruning of those classifier is necessary.Here,
CBA-CB algorithm is applied to produce the best
classifiers out of the whole set of rules.CBA-CB
algorithm is based on the idea that only those rules
which are more general and hold high support as well
as confidence levels are necessary for the classification
task[9]. The unnecessary rules should be pruned by
database coverage.Two principles are defined in CBA-
CB as follows:
General rules. Given two rules rx ⇒ lj and
ry ⇒ lj ,where 1 ≤ j ≤ N ,the first rule is more general
than the second one if rx ⊆ ry .
Precedence rank. Given two rules rx and ry , rx
has a higher precedence than ry , namely rx ry , if
(1) the confidence of rx ( con( rx ) ) is greater than that
of ry ( con( ry ) ); or (2) con( rx) = con( ry ) , but the
support of rx ( sup( rx ) ) is greater than that of
ry ( sup(ry) ); or (3) con(rx) = con(ry) and
sup( rx ) = sup( ry ) ,but rx is generated earlier than ry .
The rule set R = {r1, r 2, ", rM } comprise M rules.
Each rule rm is pruned according to the first principle.
After pruning, general rules are selected and stored in a
pruned rule set, Rp. Rank all the rules in Rp in
descendent order according to the second principle and
then record the ranked rules in a rule set RD. For each
rule rm in RD, the phrases involving in its precedent
part comprise a set, PRrm , where PRrm ⊆ P. Let L(rm)
present the class label associated with rm, where
L (rm ) = lj . Set a cover-count zero for each transaction
record ts, namely L(ts) = 0. For each rule rm in RD
,search all the records in the transaction database. For
any record ts, if it satisfies the condition PRrm ⊆ Pts, it
is selected. All the selected transaction records
comprise a new set T ' , where T ' ⊆ T . Increase the
cover-count by one for all the transaction records in S
set T ' . For any rule rm in RD, if it satisfies the condition e = ∑ hs / S
L(rm ) = L(ts ) , where ts ∈ T ' , it is put into the filtered s =1

rule set, RF. Then delete the selected rule in set RD and 1, C (ts ) ∈ C (ts ) | ∀t s ∈ T
empty set T ' . Finally, delete record ts in the trans- s.t vs =  (5)
action database if it satisfies the condition L (ts) ≥ LTH ,  2, else
where LTH is a threshold for cover-count. where e means the recommendation accuracy, namely
The pruned rules in set RF are the most significant the percentage of the transactions in the test set that are
and finally selected as classifiers to predict the class correctly classified; hs is a binary variable where it is
labels for new object customer. The object customers
set to one if transaction t s is correctly classified, and
comprise an object database O = {ok}K . For object
zero otherwise.
customer k , the requirement record is described as a
o
set of phrases, P j , where P ok ⊆ P and P ok ≠ P ts . 4. Simulation Results
Select rules rm from set RF which satisfy the condition
PRrm ⊆ Pok ,and put the selected rules in the classifier We have designed and implemented the proposed
rule set RC. Group all the rules in set RC. based on their recommendation system in an Internet programming
associated class labels. Suppose N groups are environment. The architecture of system is composed
generated, where G = { g 1, g 2, , g N } . Each group of three tire : client,application server and database
server. Five function modules are implemented
gn associates with a class label, namely
according to the system framework of the recom-
L ( gn ) = lj ,1 ≤ j ≤ N . Therefore, the classification based mendation system. In an Internet environment, we
on multiple-classifiers can be formulated as follows: apply ASP language to create the dynamic and
P ok ⇒ L ( gn ),1 ≤ n ≤ N interactive personalized pages for the Web site.To
allow the rules to be queried and managed efficiently,
s.t . ∑ con(r
m
m ) ≥ ψ | ∀rm, rm ∈ gn (4) this research deploys the Web database query run on
o
IIS server. Based on the historical sales records,
where P j represents the requirement information of transaction database is established comprising 2136
customer k; L(gn) means the class label associated with transaction records, as shown in Table 1, where
nth group gn ;con(rm) is the confidence of rule rm in customer requirements are described as a set of phrases
RF, and ψ is the threshold for confidence sum. Eqs. (4) and the corresponding class labels indicate the mobile
indicate that for the rules selected as classifiers, their phone that has been purchased.
associated class labels are selected as recommended
ones only if their confidence sum exceeds a certain Table 1. Part of Transaction records
threshold. It enables multiple class labels to be Record Requirement phrases Class
identified based on strong patterns thus adapting to the Label
problems where multiple recommendations are t1 Stylish,colorful screen, light, Nokia
black, elegant,high security 8800se
preferred to allow customers to make comparisons
t2 More functions, small,light, Dopod
among a small set of similar products. camera, large buttons 586
t3 Larger screen, business Samsung
3.4. Performance test function,Bluetooth, picture SGH-D418
and video
System performance of the proposed recomm- … … …
endation system is test and validated via the accuracy t999 Small,stylish,cheap , video, VK
measurement [8]. Suppose the test set T comprises S friendly keypad, camera 550
records, where T = {t s} . For each record in set T , t1000 Entertainment support, slim, NEC
cheap,duralbe N3105
ts = {P ts , C (ts )} , the associated class labels assigned by
the classification module comprise a set C (ts ) . Then Allowing the transaction database, the classifiers are
the recommendation accuracy is computed similar with identified. After pruning, the pruned classifiers are
[8] as following used to assign the class labels for future customer
requirements. The best classifiers are generalized after
pruning using CBA-CB algorithm . The system perfor-
mance has been validated using 500 test records. As

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shown in Table 2, the second column indicates the are extracted from text documents and transformed into
mobile phone product that has been purchased in each a set of significant phrases. And a set of association
test record, and the third column lists the mobile phone rule are mined from database using Apriori algorithm.
products that are recommended by the recommen- To enable the timely and accurate responses, CBA-CB
dation system using classifiers. In this case, 452 test algorithm is applied to produce the best rules out of the
records are correctly recommended resulting in the whole set of rules. The best classifiers are then
recommendation accuracy as 90.4%. generated after the test and validation of those rules.
These classifiers are used to predict the item labels for
Table 2. Part of recommendation results new customer requirements and thus assigns the
Record Original Recommended labels hs corresponding class labels to the customer. The system
class label analysis and design of the proposed recommendation
t1 Nokia 7610 Nokia 3230, 1 system as well as the results are also presented.
Nokia 7610
t2 Samsung Motorola E 680g, 0 References
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