Dynamic modelling of customer preferences for product design using DENFIS and opinion mining

Abstract Previous studies mainly employed customer surveys to collect survey data for understanding customer preferences on products and developing customer preference models. In reality, customer preferences on products could change over time. Thus, the time series data of customer preferences under different time periods should be collected for the modelling of customer preferences. However, it is difficult to obtain the time series data based on customer surveys because of long survey time and substantial resources involved. In recent years, a large number of online customer reviews of products can be found on various websites, from which the time series data of customer preferences can be extracted easily. Some previous studies have attempted to analyse customer preferences on products based on online customer reviews. However, two issues were not addressed in previous studies which are the fuzziness of the sentiment expressed by customers existing in online reviews and the modelling of customer preferences based on the time series data obtained from online reviews. In this paper, a new methodology for dynamic modelling of customer preferences based on online customer reviews is proposed to address the two issues which mainly involves opinion mining and dynamic evolving neural-fuzzy inference system (DENFIS). Opinion mining is adopted to analyze online reviews and perform sentiment analysis on the reviews under different time periods. With the mined time series data and the product attribute settings of reviewed products, a DENFIS approach is introduced to perform the dynamic modelling of customer preferences. A case study is used to illustrate the proposed methodology. The results of validation tests indicate that the proposed DENFIS approach outperforms various adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) approaches in the dynamic modelling of customer preferences in terms of the mean relative error and variance of errors. In addition, the proposed DENFIS approach can provide both crisp and fuzzy outputs that cannot be realized by using existing ANFIS and conventional DENFIS approaches.

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