A Proposed Business Intelligent Framework for Recommender Systems

In this Internet age, recommender systems (RS) have become popular, offering new opportunities and challenges to the business world. With a continuous increase in global competition, e-businesses, information portals, social networks and more, websites are required to become more user-centric and rely on the presence and role of RS in assisting users in better decision making. However, with continuous changes in user interests and consumer behavior patterns that are influenced by easy access to vast information and social factors, raising the quality of recommendations has become a challenge for recommender systems. There is a pressing need for exploring hybrid models of the five main types of RS, namely collaborative, demographic, utility, content and knowledge based approaches along with advancements in Big Data (BD) to become more context-aware of the technology and social changes and to behave intelligently. There is a gap in literature with a research focus in this direction. This paper takes a step to address this by exploring a new paradigm of applying business intelligence (BI) concepts to RS for intelligently responding to user changes and business complexities. A BI based framework adopting a hybrid methodology for RS is proposed with a focus on enhancing the RS performance. Such a business intelligent recommender system (BIRS) can adopt On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools and performance monitoring metrics using data mining techniques of BI to enhance its own learning, user profiling and predictive models for making a more useful set of personalised recommendations to its users. The application of the proposed framework to a B2C e-commerce case example is presented.