High-Performance Actionable Knowledge Miner for Boosting Business Revenue

Abstract

This research proposes a novel strategy for constructing a knowledge-based recommender system (RS) based on both structured data and unstructured text data. We present its application to improve the services of heavy equipment repair companies to better adjust to their customers’ needs. The ultimate outcome of this work is a visualized web-based interactive recommendation dashboard that shows options that are predicted to improve the customer loyalty metric, known as Net Promoter Score (NPS). We also present a number of techniques aiming to improve the performance of action rule mining by allowing to have convenient periodic updates of the system’s knowledge base. We describe the preprocessing-based and distributed-processing-based method and present the results of testing them for performance within the RS framework. The proposed modifications for the actionable knowledge miner were implemented and compared with the original method in terms of the mining results/times and generated recommendations. Preprocessing-based methods decreased mining by 10–20×, while distributed mining implementation decreased mining timesby 300–400×, with negligible knowledge loss. The article concludes with the future directions for the scalability of the NPS recommender system and remaining challenges in its big data processing.