Rough Web Intelligent Techniques for Page Recommendation

Recommender systems represent a prominent class of personalized Web applications, which particularly focus on the user-dependent filtering and selection of relevant information. Recommender Systems have been a subject of extensive research in Artificial Intelligence over the last decade, but with today’s increasing number of e-commerce environments on the Web, the demand for new approaches to intelligent product recommendation is higher than ever. There are more online users, more online channels, more vendors, more products, and, most importantly, increasingly complex products and services. These recent developments in the area of recommender systems generated new demands, in particular with respect to interactivity, adaptivity, and user preference elicitation. These challenges, however, are also in the focus of general Web page recommendation research. The goal of this chapter is to develop robust techniques to model noisy data sets containing an unknown number of overlapping categories and apply them for Web personalization and mining. In this chapter, rough set-based clustering approaches are used to discover Web user access patterns, and these techniques compute a number of clusters automatically from the Web log data using statistical techniques. The suitability of rough clustering approaches for Web page recommendation are measured using predictive accuracy metrics.