Hybrid approaches to product recommendation based on customer lifetime value and purchase preferences

Abstract

Recommending products to attract customers and meet their needs is important in fiercely competitive environments. Recommender systems have emerged in e-commerce applications to Support the recommendation of products. Recently, a weighted RFM-based method (WRFM-based method) has been proposed to provide recommendations based on customer lifetime value, including Recency, Frequency and Monetary. Preference-based collaborative filtering (CF) typically makes recommendations based on the similarities of customer preferences. This study proposes two hybrid methods that exploit the merits of the WRFM-based method and the preference-based CF method to improve the quality of recommendations. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the quality of recommendations provided by the proposed methods, using a data set concerning the hardware retail marketing. The experimental results indicate that the proposed hybrid methods outperform the WRFM-based method and the preference-based CF method. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.