Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 3336: Session-Based Recommender System for Sustainable Digital Marketing (Sustainability)

Many companies operate e-commerce websites to sell fashion products. Some customers want to buy products with intention of sustainability and therefore the companies need to suggest appropriate fashion products to those customers. Recommender systems are key applications in these sustainable digital marketing strategies and high performance is the most necessary factor. This research aims to improve recommendation systems’ performance by considering item session and attribute session information. We suggest the Item Session-Based Recommender (ISBR) and the Attribute Session-Based Recommenders (ASBRs) that use item and attribute session data independently, and then we suggest the Feature-Weighted Session-Based Recommenders (FWSBRs) that combine multiple ASBRs with various feature weighting schemes. Our experimental results show that FWSBR with chi-square feature weighting scheme outperforms ISBR, ASBRs, and Collaborative Filtering Recommender (CFR). In addition, it is notable that FWSBRs overcome the cold-start item problem, one significant limitation of CFR and ISBR, without losing performance.