A Hybrid Two-Phase Recommendation for Group-Buying E-commerce Applications

The last two decades have witnessed an explosive growth of e-commerce applications. Existing online recommendation systems for e-commerce applications, particularly group-buying applications, suffer from scalability and data sparsity problems when confronted with exponentially increasing large-scale data. This leads to a poor recommendation effect of traditional collaborative filtering (CF) methods in group-buying applications. In order to address this challenge, this paper proposes a hybrid two-phase recommendation (HTPR) method which consists of offline preparation and online recommendation, combining clustering and collaborative filtering techniques. The user-item category tendency matrix is constructed after clustering items, and then users are clustered to facilitate personalized recommendation where items are generated by collaborative filtering technology. In addition, a parallelized strategy was developed to optimize the recommendation process. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset were conducted by comparing HTPR with other three recommendation methods: traditional CF, user-clustering based CF, and item-clustering based CF. The experimental results show that the proposed HTPR method is effective and can improve the accuracy of online recommendation systems for group-buying applications.