Recommendation system for grocery store considering data sparsity

In grocery stores, large-scale transaction data with identification, such as point of sales (POS) data, is being accumulated as a result of the introduction of frequent shopper programs. We propose two recommendation systems based on transaction data of a grocery store. In recommending product items in grocery stores, data sparsity is a problem. This is because individual customers only purchase very few of the total number of product items a store sells. We evaluate various recommendation methods including SVD-type recommendation based on real POS data and summarize methods suitable for the proposed recommendation systems. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.