Utility in Fashion with implicit feedback

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to distinguish genuine customer preferences from commercial influences in fashion e-retail by analyzing implicit user behavior signals, improving recommendation accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel metric to separate user preferences from commercial factors using implicit behavioral signals, advancing fashion recommendation systems.

Findings

Successfully separates user preference from commercial influences

Enhances accuracy of fashion recommendation systems

Provides a new approach to interpret implicit user signals

Abstract

Fashion preference is a fuzzy concept that depends on customer taste, prevailing norms in fashion product/style, henceforth used interchangeably, and a customer's perception of utility or fashionability, yet fashion e-retail relies on algorithmically generated search and recommendation systems that process structured data and images to best match customer preference. Retailers study tastes solely as a function of what sold vs what did not, and take it to represent customer preference. Such explicit modeling, however, belies the underlying user preference, which is a complicated interplay of preference and commercials such as brand, price point, promotions, other sale events, and competitor push/marketing. It is hard to infer a notion of utility or even customer preference by looking at sales data. In search and recommendation systems for fashion e-retail, customer preference is implicitly derived by user-user similarity or item-item similarity. In this work, we aim to derive a metric that separates the buying preferences of users from the commercials of the merchandise (price, promotions, etc). We extend our earlier work on explicit signals to gauge sellability or preference with implicit signals from user behaviour.