Description
Programming Assignment Explanation
Product Recommendations: The action or practice of selling additional
products or ser-vices to existing customers is called cross-selling. Giving
product recommendation is one of the examples of cross-selling that are
frequently used by online retailers. One simple method to give product
recommendations is to recommend products that are frequently browsed
together by the customers.
Suppose we want to recommend new products to the customer based on the
products they have already browsed on the online website. Write a program
using the A-priori algorithm to find products which are frequently browsed
together. Fix the support to s =100 (i.e., product pairs need to occur together
at least 100 times to be considered frequent) and find item sets of size 2 and
3.
Use the online browsing behavior dataset provided with this homework. Each
line represents a browsing session of a customer. On each line, each string of
8 characters represents the id of an item browsed during that session. The
items are separated by spaces.
a) Identify pairs of items (X, Y) such that the support of {X, Y}is at least
100. For all such pairs, compute the confidence scores of the
corresponding association rules: X⇒Y, Y⇒X. Sort the rules in
decreasing order of confidence scores and list the top 5 rules in
the writeup. Break ties, if any, by lexicographically increasing order on
the left hand side of the rule.
b) Identify item triples (X, Y, Z) such that the support of {X, Y, Z}is at
least 100. For all such triples, compute the confidence scores of the
corresponding association rules: (X, Y) ⇒ Z, (X, Z) ⇒ Y, (Y, Z) ⇒ X.
Sort the rules in decreasing order of confidence scores and list the top 5
rules in the writeup. Order the left-hand-side pair lexicographically and
break ties, if any, by lexicographical order of the first then the second
item in the pair.
c) Output Format:
• The output of your program should be dumped in a file named
“output.txt” in the following format:
OUTPUT A
FRO11987 FRO12685 0.4325
FRO11987 ELE11375 0.4225
FRO11987 GRO94758 0.4125
FRO11987 SNA80192 0.4025
FRO11987 FRO18919 0.4015
OUTPUT B
FRO11987 FRO12685 DAI95741 0.4325
FRO11987 ELE11375 GRO73461 0.4225
FRO11987 GRO94758 ELE26917 0.4125
FRO11987 SNA80192 ELE28189 0.4025
FRO11987 FRO18919 GRO68850 0.4015
Explanation:
–Line 1 should have “Output A”
–Next five lines should have the top five rules with decreasing
confidence scores for part (a) of the programming question. Format:
< item1> < item2>
–Line 7 should have “Output B”
–Next five lines should have the top five rules with decreasing
confidence scores for part (b) of the programming question. Format:
< item1> < item2> < item3> < confidence > meaning {item1, item2}
⇒ item3
• Unix/ Linux OS: Make sure the output.txt file is dumped when you
execute the script
run_code.sh
• In Windows OS, your program should create this file, output.txt,
within the same folder as your program and data.
