A Recommender System that Considers Contradictory Impression in Fashion

Abstract

We aim to develop a recommender system, that is often used in e-commerce sites, to help users choose and do mix-and-match clothing. A series of users’ behavior to choose clothes and accessories according to their liking, and do mix-and-match them is called “fashion coordination” in this paper. The proposed recommender system has a new mechanism that proposes an alternative fashion coordination to boost the user’s self-image. This mechanism implemented by utilizing the semantic dimension of impression judgments in the fashion coordination, based on a semantic differential method and a factor analysis. Through this mechanism, the users will be able to consider contradictory impression in the fashion coordination: not only those that they believe will suit them, but also those that they desire but may not suit them. The system provides a comprehensive evaluation of the contradictory impression in the fashion coordination, and a person can be persuaded to buy or wear clothing that they previously believed would not suit them. In this study, as a preliminary stage to construct the recommender system, we conducted a psychological experiment that participants evaluated photo-images of varied outfits. We also constructed 24 evaluation scales based on the experimental results, and examined the semantic differential method and the factor analysis to model user’s contradictory impression in the fashion coordination.