An
Adaptive Product Recommendation System for Anonymous Internet Visitors
Jia-Jiunn
Lo
Department of Information Management, Chung-Hua
University
No. 707, Sec.2,
Tel: (03) 5186045 Fax:
(03) 5186546
E-mail: jlo@mi.chu.edu.tw
Yu-Sheng Lin
Department of Information Management,
Chung-Hua University
No. 707, Sec.2,
This research develops an adaptive product
recommendation system for anonymous new customers based on their interests,
media preferences, and the Web page downloading time. To protect the user’s
privacy, a temporary user model is constructed when the user enters the system
and deleted when the user leaves, so the user remains anonymous throughout the
browsing session. The system can estimate the user’s current interests by
incremental learning by observing the user’s browsing behavior. By using the
exponential smoothing procedure, the user’s interests are estimated smoothly by
increasing the weight of more recent selected information so that the system
can track incremental change of user interests. For the issue of system
performance, a two-layer product catalog structure and a two-stage
breadth-first search algorithm are proposed to reduce system load so that the
possibility of real-time recommendation is increased. In addition, this system
uses a frame variant based dynamic Web page to adaptively present the product
data with respect to the user’s media preference and the Web page downloading
time to increase the user’s will to continue browsing on the Web site.
An experimental system for recommending audio CDs
was developed and a TAM model was used to evaluate the proposed adaptive
product recommendation system. The experimental results revealed that the
perceived ease of use and usefulness of the proposed system had significant
positive effects on the user’s attitude and intention to use the proposed
system. For perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and attitude to use,
there were no significant difference between high bandwidth and low bandwidth
users. However, the low bandwidth users had higher intention to use the
proposed system. In addition, the experimental results revealed that the
subjects believed that the experimental system could recommend audio CDs they
were interested in and they would be willing to use the experimental system,
especially when their needs were not clear. This implies that the proposed
model can be especially beneficial for those users who do not know their real
needs and/or do not know how to clearly specify their needs. The subjects also agreed
that the experimental system could provide graphics and audio clips matching
the bandwidth they used. For system efficiency, the subjects agreed that the experimental
system could help them quickly find audio CDs of interest to them.
Keywords: adaptive Web site, user
model, privacy, product recommendation, anonymous user