A New Approach for Item Choice Recommendations

Market basket databases contain historical data on prior customer choices where each customer has selected a subset of items, a market basket, out of a large but finite set. This data can be used to generate a dynamic recommendation of new items to a customer who is in the process of making the item choices. We develop a statistical model to compute the probability of a new item becoming the next choice given the current partial basket, and make a recommendation list based on a ranking of this probability. What makes our approach different from the usual collaborative filtering approaches, is that we account not only for the choice making, or buying, associated with the items present in the partial basket (associative buying), but also for the fact that a customer exercises an independent choice unrelated to the existing partial basket (renewal buying). We compute the probability of both renewal choice and associative choice given the partial basket content, and obtain the probabilities for each item given one of these two buying modes. Our experiments on the publicly available "ms.com" data set shows our new approach yields faster and more accurate prediction compared to other techniques that have been proposed for this problem in the literature.