Domain Knowledge Based Link Prediction in Customer-Product Bipartite Graph for Product Recommendation

In this paper, we propose domain knowledge-based link prediction algorithm in customer-product bipartite network to improve effectiveness of product recommendation in retail. The domain knowledge is classified into product domain knowledge and time context knowledge, which play an important part in link prediction. We take both of them into consideration in recommendation and form a unified domain knowledge-based link prediction framework. We capture product semantic similarity by ontology-based analysis and time attenuation factor from time context knowledge, then incorporate them into network topological similarity to form a new linkage measure. To evaluate the algorithm, we use a real retail transaction dataset from Food Mart. Experimental results demonstrate that the usage of domain knowledge in link prediction achieved significantly better performance.