Alleviating cold start and sparsity problems in the micro, small, and medium enterprises marketplace using clustering and imputation techniques

Abstract

Recommendation systems are often implemented in e-commerce and micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) marketplaces to improve consumer services by providing product recommendations according to their interests. However, it still faces problems, namely sparsity and cold start, thus affecting the quality of recommendations. This research proposes clustering and imputation techniques to overcome this problem. The clustering technique used is k-means, while the missing value imputation method uses average values. The imputation results are then implemented in the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and naïve Bayes algorithms and evaluated based on performance accuracy. Experimental results show an increase in accuracy of 16.48% in the KNN algorithm from 83.52% to 100%. Meanwhile, the naïve Bayes algorithm increased accuracy by 35.30% from 64.70% to 100%.