Recommend products with consideration of multi-category inter-purchase time and price

•A method for deriving the changes of a user's interest for various categories is suggested.•We put forward an approach to model a user's multi-category inter-purchase interval.•The price preferences of users are constructed based on fuzzy set theory.•We propose a recommender system by incorporating purchase interval and price.•The proposed recommendation algorithm is evaluated with real purchase records.

This study focuses on diversifying recommendations and improving recommendation accuracy by incorporating multi-category purchase interval and price in a novel way. We suggest a method to model the drift of a user's interest for different categories based on sequential pattern mining. Additionally, we propose a new approach to model personalized multi-category inter-purchase interval for the user. By employing fuzzy set theory, we also put forward an approach to model the price preferences for each user. We propose a recommender system that incorporates the methods mentioned above. The experimental results based on real purchase records show that the proposed recommendation algorithm has high stability and superior performance in recommending products with different characteristics. The results also demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating purchase interval and price factor in recommender systems. This study demonstrates the existence of particular inter-purchase intervals among different categories, and indicates that price is an important factor influencing customers' decision making.