Multi-Criteria Recommendation Systems to Foster Online Grocery

Sensors (Basel). 2021 May 28;21(11):3747. doi: 10.3390/s21113747.

Abstract

With the exponential increase in information, it has become imperative to design mechanisms that allow users to access what matters to them as quickly as possible. The recommendation system (RS) with information technology development is the solution, it is an intelligent system. Various types of data can be collected on items of interest to users and presented as recommendations. RS also play a very important role in e-commerce. The purpose of recommending a product is to designate the most appropriate designation for a specific product. The major challenge when recommending products is insufficient information about the products and the categories to which they belong. In this paper, we transform the product data using two methods of document representation: bag-of-words (BOW) and the neural network-based document combination known as vector-based (Doc2Vec). We propose three-criteria recommendation systems (product, package and health) for each document representation method to foster online grocery shopping, which depends on product characteristics such as composition, packaging, nutrition table, allergen, and so forth. For our evaluation, we conducted a user and expert survey. Finally, we compared the performance of these three criteria for each document representation method, discovering that the neural network-based (Doc2Vec) performs better and completely alters the results.

Keywords: Doc2Vec; bag-of-word; digital transformation; grocery industry; nutrition table; recommender systems; retail market.