Recommending new items to customers : A comparison between Collaborative Filtering and Association Rule Mining
Henrik Sohlberg · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2015
E-commerce is an ever growing industry as the internet infrastructure continues to evolve. The benefits from a recommendation system to any online retail store are several. It can help customers to find what they need as well as increase sales by enabling accurate targeted promotions. Among many techniques that can form recommendation systems, this thesis compares Collaborative Filtering against Association Rule Mining, both implemented in combination with clustering. The suggested implementations are designed with the cold start problem in mind and are evaluated with a data set from an online retail store which sells clothing. The results indicate that Collaborative Filtering is the preferable technique while associated rules may still offer business value to stakeholders. However, the strength of the results is undermined by the fact that only a single data set was used.