Application of Web usage mining and product taxonomy to collaborative recommendations in e-commerce

The rapid growth of e-commerce has caused product overload where customers on the Web are no longer able to effectively choose the products they are exposed to. To overcome the product overload of online shoppers, a variety of recommendation methods have been developed. Collaborative filtering (CF) is the most successful recommendation method, but its widespread use has exposed some well-known limitations, such as sparsity and scalability, which can lead to poor recommendations. This paper proposes a recommendation methodology based on Web usage mining, and product taxonomy to enhance the recommendation quality and the system performance of current CF-based recommender systems. Web usage mining populates the rating database by tracking customers' shopping behaviors on the Web, thereby leading to better quality recommendations. The product taxonomy is used to improve the performance of searching for nearest neighbors through dimensionality reduction of the rating database. Several experiments on real e-commerce data show that the proposed methodology provides higher quality recommendations and better performance than other CF methodologies. (C) 2003. Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.