A problem of data mining in E-commerce

Data mining is generally defined as the science of nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from datasets. There are many websites on the Internet that provide extensive information about products and allow users post comments on various products and rate the product on a scale of 1 to 5. During the past decade, the need for intelligent algorithms for calculating and organizing extremely large sets of data has grown exponentially. In this article we investigate the extent to which a product's average user rating can be predicted, using a manageable subset of a data set. For this we use a linearization-algorithm based prediction model and sketch how an inverse problem can be formulated to yield a smooth local volatility function of user ratings. The MAPLE programs that implement the proposed algorithm show that the method is reasonably accurate for the reconstruction of volatility of user ratings, which is useful both in accurate user predictions as well as computing sensitivity. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.