Using Bayesian Network to Predict Online Review Helpfulness

The enormous volume and largely varying quality of available reviews provide a great obstacle to seek out the most helpful reviews. While Naive Bayesian Network (NBN) is one of the matured artificial intelligence approaches for business decision support, the usage of NBN to predict the helpfulness of online reviews is lacking. This study intends to suggest HPNBN (a helpfulness prediction model using NBN), which adopts NBN for helpfulness prediction. This study crawled sample data from Amazon website and 8699 reviews comprise the final sample. Twenty-one predictors represent reviewer and textual traits as well as product traits of the reviews. We investigate how the expanded list of predictors including product, reviewer, and textual characteristics of eWOM (online word-of-mouth) has an effect on helpfulness by suggesting conditional probabilities of the binned determinants. The prediction accuracy of NBN outperformed that of the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) method and the neural network (NN) model. The results of this study can support determining helpfulness and support website design to induce review helpfulness. This study will help decision-makers predict the helpfulness of the review comments posted to their websites and manage more effective customer satisfaction strategies. When prospect customers feel such review helpfulness, they will have a stronger intention to pay a regular visit to the target website.