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Context-Aware Interactive Knowledge-Based Recommendation

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Abstract

Recommender systems have widely been used in the past few years as a recipe to success in e-commerce. Already, 35 percent of what consumers purchase on Amazon and 75 percent of what they watch on Netflix come from product recommendation (MacKenzie et al. in How retailers can keep up with consumers. Technical report. McKinsey & Company, London, 2013). However, in the context of high-end products such as cars, computers, apartments, or financial services, traditional approaches are not the best choice since it is infeasible to collect enough customer behavioral information or feedback over numerous items (Burke et al. in Ai Mag 32:13–8, 2011). Accordingly, since brick and mortar outlets remain the channel of choice for those kinds of products, recommender systems need to adjust to a context in which inventory and customer information are limited. To achieve this goal, we propose a context-aware interactive knowledge-based recommendation to make recommendation to customers who walk into a store, even when no previous information about the customers is available. This technique works in 3 stages: stage 1, contextual pre-filtering, stage 2, interactive exploration and stage 3, constraint-based recommendation. The methodology was developed with an industrial partner in the domain of sport vehicles and is illustrated step by step with an example inspired from this partnership. The proposed method enables an iterative exploration of the products in-store, creates a learning base to learn customers’ interests and recommends a suitable product with regards to logistics, contracts and product’s availability in the network. The method has been tested on our industrial partners’ data and validated by domain experts. This work is a step toward the creation of a continuously evolving learning base of customers’ interests that can be used to adjust sale’s strategy and to develop new products, designs and features that better meet the ever-changing demand of customers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Départment de mathématique et génie industriel, Polytechnique Montréal, Montréal, H3T1J4, QC, Canada

    Camélia Dadouchi & Bruno Agard

  2. Physical Internet Center, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Atlanta, 30332, GA, USA

    Benoit Montreuil

Authors
  1. Camélia Dadouchi
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  2. Bruno Agard
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  3. Benoit Montreuil
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Correspondence to Camélia Dadouchi.

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The authors would like to acknowledge the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for funding this work under grant RDCPJ 492021-15, and for providing other support for this research. The authors also declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Dadouchi, C., Agard, B. & Montreuil, B. Context-Aware Interactive Knowledge-Based Recommendation. SN COMPUT. SCI. 3, 472 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-022-01328-1

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