Enhanced Recommendation System for E-commerce Applications

Abstract

Recommendation algorithms play a quintessential role in development of E-commerce recommendation system, Where in Collaborative filtering algorithm is a major contributor for most recommendation systems since they are a flavor of KNN algorithm specifically tailored for E-commerce Web Applications, the main advantages of using CF algorithms are they are efficient in capturing collective experiences and behavior of e-commerce customers in real time, But it is noted that , this results in the phenomenon of Mathew effect, Wherein only popular products are listed into the recommendation list and lesser popular items tend to become even more scarce. Hence this results in products which are already familiar to users being discovered redundantly, thus potential discovery of niche and new items in the e-commerce application is compromised. To address this issue , this paper throws light on user behavior on the online shopping platform , accordingly a novel selectivity based collaborative filtering algorithm is proposed with innovator products that can recommend niche items but less popular products to users by introducing the concept of collaborative filtering with consumer influencing capability. Specifically, innovator products are a special subset of products which are less popular/ have received less traction from users but are genuinely of higher quality, therefore, these aforementioned products can be captured in the recommendation list via innovator-recognition table, achieving the balance between popularity and practicability for the user