Evolutionary intelligent agents for e-commerce: Generic preference detection with feature analysis

Product recommendation and preference tracking systems have been adopted extensively in e-commerce businesses. However, the heterogeneity of product attributes results in undesired impediment for an efficient yet personalized e-commerce product brokering. Amid the assortment of product attributes, there are some intrinsic generic attributes having significant relation to a customer s generic preference. This paper proposes a novel approach in the detection of generic product attributes through feature analysis. The objective is to provide an insight to the understanding of customers generic preference. Furthermore, a genetic algorithm is used to find the suitable feature weight set, hence reducing the rate of misclassification. A prototype has been implemented and the experimental results are promising. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.