Understanding and Utilizing User Preferences

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Understanding and Utilizing User Preferences"

by

Miss Yu PENG


ABSTRACT:

With the rapid growth of web-based applications, mining personalized 
preferences for promotion becomes a hot topic. In this proposal, we focus on 
two problems related to user preferences: understanding user preferences and 
utilizing user preferences in finding preferable products.

In understanding user preferences, we propose two sub-problems. The first 
problem is called attribute-based subsequence matching (ASM) : given a query 
sequence and a set of sequences, considering the attributes of elements, we 
want to find all the sequences which are matched by this query sequence. We 
propose an efficient algorithm for problem ASM by applying the Chinese 
Remainder Theorem. The second problem is to find all the attribute-based 
frequent subsequences. We adapt an existing efficient algorithm for this second 
problem to show that we can use the algorithm developed for the first problem. 
Experimental results show that frequent subsequences reflect user preferences, 
and our algorithms are scalable in large datasets. This work can stimulate a 
lot of existing data mining problems which are fundamentally based on 
subsequence matching.

In utilizing user preferences, we identify and tackle the problem of finding 
top-k preferable products, which has not been studied before. We study two 
instances of preferable products, namely profitable products and popular 
products by using the concept of skyline, which can be regarded as customer 
preferences. We propose methods to find top-k profitable products and top-k 
popular products efficiently. An extensive performance study using both 
synthetic and real datasets is reported to verify its effectiveness and 
efficiency. In this proposal, we report our current work on these two areas and 
discuss several future plans.


Date:                   Thursday, 22 March 2012

Time:                   10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 3405
                         lifts 17/18

Committee Members:      Dr. Raymond Wong (Supervisor)
                         Dr. Wilfred Ng (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lei Chen
 			Prof. Dik-Lun Lee


**** ALL are Welcome ****