A cognitive approach for agent-based personalized recommendation

There is an increasing need for various e-service, e-commerce and e-business sites to provide personalized recommendations to on-line customers. This paper proposes a new type of personalized recommendation agents called fuzzy cognitive agents. Fuzzy cognitive agents are designed to give personalized suggestions based on the user’s current personal preferences, other user’s common preferences, and expert’s domain knowledge. Fuzzy cognitive agents are able to represent knowledge via extended fuzzy cognitive maps, to learn users’ preferences from most recent cases and to help customers make inferences and decisions through numeric computation instead of symbolic and logic deduction. A case study is included to illustrate how personalized recommendations are made by fuzzy cognitive agents in e-commerce sites. The case study demonstrates that the fuzzy cognitive agent is both flexible and effective in supporting e-commerce applications.