SMEC: Scene Mining for E-Commerce

Scene-based recommendation has proven its usefulness in E-commerce, by recommending commodities based on a given scene. However, scenes are typically unknown in advance, which necessitates scene discovery for E-commerce. In this article, we study scene discovery for E-commerce systems. We first formalize a scene as a set of commodity categories that occur simultaneously and frequently in real-world situations, and model an E-commerce platform as a heterogeneous information network (HIN), whose nodes and links represent different types of objects and different types of relationships between objects, respectively. We then formulate the scene mining problem for E-commerce as an unsupervised learning problem that finds the overlapping clusters of commodity categories in the HIN. To solve the problem, we propose a non-negative matrix factorization based method SMEC (Scene Mining for E-Commerce), and theoretically prove its convergence. Using six real-world E-commerce datasets, we finally conduct an extensive experimental study to evaluate SMEC against 13 other methods, and show that SMEC consistently outperforms its competitors with regard to various evaluation measures.