CAPReS: Context Aware Persona Based Recommendation for Shoppers

Abstract

Nowadays, brick-and-mortar stores are finding it extremely difficult to retain their customers due to the ever increasing competition from the online stores. One of the key reasons for this is the lack of personalized shopping experience offered by the brick-and-mortar stores. This work considers the problem of persona based shopping recommendation for such stores to maximize the value for money of the shoppers. For this problem, it proposes a non-polynomial time-complexity optimal dynamic program and a polynomial time-complexity non-optimal heuristic, for making top-k recommendations by taking into account shopper persona and her time and budget constraints. In our empirical evaluations with a mix of real-world data and simulated data, the performance of the heuristic in terms of the persona based recommendations (quantified by similarity scores and items recommended) closely matched (differed by only 8% each with) that of the dynamic program and at the same time heuristic ran at least twice faster compared to the dynamic program.