Connecting social media to e-commerce:cold-start product recommendation using microblogging information

Abstract

In recent years, the boundaries between e-commerce and social networking have become increasingly blurred. Many e-commerce websites support the mechanism of social login where users can sign on the websites using their social network identities such as their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Users can also post their newly purchased products on microblogs with links to the e-commerce product web pages. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for cross-site cold-start product recommendation, which aims to recommend products from e-commerce websites to users at social networking sites in 'cold-start' situations, a problem which has rarely been explored before. A major challenge is how to leverage knowledge extracted from social networking sites for cross-site cold-start product recommendation. We propose to use the linked users across social networking sites and e-commerce websites (users who have social networking accounts and have made purchases on e-commerce websites) as a bridge to map users' social networking features to another feature representation for product recommendation. In specific, we propose learning both users' and products' feature representations (called user embeddings and product embeddings, respectively) from data collected from e-commerce websites using recurrent neural networks and then apply a modified gradient boosting trees method to transform users' social networking features into user embeddings. We then develop a feature-based matrix factorization approach which can leverage the learnt user embeddings for cold-start product recommendation. Experimental results on a large dataset constructed from the largest Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo and the largest Chinese B2C e-commerce website JingDong have shown the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2015.2508816
Divisions: College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > Systems analytics research institute (SARI)
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Additional Information: © 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Uncontrolled Keywords: e-commerce,microblogs,product demographic,product recommender,recurrent neural networks,Computational Theory and Mathematics,Information Systems,Computer Science Applications
Publication ISSN: 1558-2191
Last Modified: 22 Mar 2024 08:13
Date Deposited: 19 May 2016 10:00
Full Text Link: http://ieeexplo ... rnumber=7355341
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2016-05-01
Published Online Date: 2015-12-17
Accepted Date: 2015-12-07
Submitted Date: 2015-06-02
Authors: Zhao, Wayne Xin
Li, Sui
He, Yulan (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-3948-5845)
Chang, Edward Y.
Wen, Ji-Rong
Li, Xiaoming

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