Social Network : A Novel Approach to New Customer Recommendations

Collaborative filtering recommends products using customers' preferences, so it cannot recommend products to the new customer who has no preference information. This paper proposes a novel approach to new customer recommendations using the social network analysis which is used to search relationships among social entities such as genetics network, traffic network, organization network, etc. The proposed recommendation method identifies customers most likely to be neighbors to the new customer using the centrality theory in social network analysis and recommends products those customers have liked in the past. The procedure of our method is divided into four phases : purchase similarity analysis, social network construction, centrality-based neighborhood formation, and recommendation generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted several experiments using a data set from a department store in Korea. Our method was compared with the best-seller-based method that uses the best-seller list to generate recommendations for the new customer. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the best-seller-based method as measured by F1-measure.