An Incremental Hierarchical Clustering Based System For Record Linkage In E-Commerce Domain

Abstract

In this study, a novel record linkage system for E-commerce products is presented. Our system aims to cluster the same products that are crawled from different E-commerce websites into the same cluster. The proposed system achieves a very high success rate by combining both semi-supervised and unsupervised approaches. Unlike the previously proposed systems in the literature, neither a training set nor structured corpora are necessary. The core of the system is based on Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC); however, the HAC algorithm is modified to be dynamic such that it can efficiently cluster a stream of incoming new data. Since the proposed system does not depend on any prior data, it can cluster new products. The system uses bag-of-words representation of the product titles, employs a single distance metric, exploits multiple domain-based attributes and does not depend on the characteristics of the natural language used in the product records. To our knowledge, there is no commonly used tool or technique to measure the quality of a clustering task. Therefore in this study, we use ELKI (Environment for Developing KDD-Applications Supported by Index-Structures), an open-source data mining software, for performance measurement of the clustering methods; and show how to use ELKI for this purpose. To evaluate our system, we collect our own dataset and make it publicly available to researchers who study E-commerce product clustering. Our proposed system achieves 96.25% F-Measure according to our experimental analysis. The other state-of-the-art clustering systems obtain the best 89.12% F-Measure.