Preface to the special issue on data mining for personalization

Bamshad Mobasher, Alexander Tuzhilin
2008 User modeling and user-adapted interaction  
The continued growth and proliferation of e-commerce, online services, and Webbased information systems, has led to an explosion of available content and resources in digital form. As a result of user interactions with these resources, tremendous volumes of clickstream, transaction, and user data are collected by organizations in their daily operations. Mining and analyzing such data can help these organizations determine the life time value of clients, design cross marketing strategies across
more » ... roducts and services, evaluate the effectiveness of targeted promotional campaigns, and thus provide more effective personalized content to visitors. Automatic personalization is a central technology used in user-adaptive systems to deliver dynamic content, such as textual information, links, advertisements, and product recommendations that are tailored to the needs and interests of a particular user or a segment of users. The process of personalization comprises iterative invocations of the personalization cycle consisting of the stages of understanding the user and building user profiles and models; delivering personalized offerings to the users based on this understanding; measuring impacts of these offerings on the users; and adjusting all the previous stages based on the measured feedback. Data mining is one of the key technologies used in various stages of this personalization process, especially in building user models and delivering personalized offerings to the users. Therefore, it is crucial to develop appropriate data mining methods fitting the corresponding personalization tasks well.
doi:10.1007/s11257-008-9060-2 fatcat:wktxkjytsbgnbhdevplo6s6wwu