OntoCommerce: Incorporating Ontology and Sequential Pattern Mining for Personalized E-Commerce Recommendations

The abundance of information on online purchasing websites makes it challenging for customers to locate products that match their preferences. However, the cold-start problem arises when there isn’t enough previous data, making it harder to make accurate recommendations for new customers or products. The enormous number of possible customers and products in a recommendation system leads to sparse data, which makes it harder to generate relevant recommendations and causes the sparsity problem. In addition, existing e-commerce recommender systems have difficulty making accurate product recommendations because they disregard individual consumer characteristics. In order to overcome these limitations, a hybrid recommender system combining ontology and sequential pattern mining (SPM) techniques is proposed. The strategy entails constructing an ontology that encompasses customer and product-related knowledge in the e-commerce domain. This ontology is then utilized to calculate customer preference similarities and generate predictions for the intended customer. The SPM algorithm is applied to the results of collaborative filtering to generate personalized recommendations for the customer. Experiments have demonstrated that the hybrid recommender system outperforms existing methods and resolves the cold-start problem and data sparsity in e-commerce recommender systems effectively. Even with limited initial data, the system generates accurate and individualized recommendations based on ontological domain knowledge and the customer’s sequential purchase patterns. By integrating ontology and sequential pattern mining, this strategy enhances the precision and individualization of the e-commerce industry’s recommendation process.