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Expert Systems
with Applications
Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1200–1209
www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

A recommender system using GA K-means clustering

in an online shopping market
a,* b
Kyoung-jae Kim , Hyunchul Ahn
a
Department of Management Information Systems, Dongguk University, 3-26 Pil-Dong, Jung-Gu, Seoul 100-715, South Korea
b
Graduate School of Management, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 207-43 Cheongrangri-Dong,
Dongdaemun-Gu, Seoul 130-722, South Korea

Abstract

The Internet is emerging as a new marketing channel, so understanding the characteristics of online customers’ needs and expectations
is considered a prerequisite for activating the consumer-oriented electronic commerce market. In this study, we propose a novel clustering
algorithm based on genetic algorithms (GAs) to effectively segment the online shopping market. In general, GAs are believed to be effective
on NP-complete global optimization problems, and they can provide good near-optimal solutions in reasonable time. Thus, we believe
that a clustering technique with GA can provide a way of finding the relevant clusters more effectively. The research in this paper applied
K-means clustering whose initial seeds are optimized by GA, which is called GA K-means, to a real-world online shopping market seg-
mentation case. In this study, we compared the results of GA K-means to those of a simple K-means algorithm and self-organizing maps
(SOM). The results showed that GA K-means clustering may improve segmentation performance in comparison to other typical clustering
algorithms. In addition, our study validated the usefulness of the proposed model as a preprocessing tool for recommendation systems.
 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Recommender system; Genetic algorithms; Self-organizing maps; Market segmentation; Case-based reasoning

1. Introduction classes in which the consumers can be naturally grouped,

Since the Internet has become popular, the consumer-
oriented electronic commerce market has grown so huge
that now companies are convinced of the importance of
understanding this new emerging market. It is becoming
more important for the companies to analyze and under-
stand the needs and expectations of their online users or
customers because the Internet is one of the most effective
media to gather, disseminate and utilize the information
about its users or customers. Thus, it is easier to extract
knowledge out of the shopping process to create new busi-
ness opportunities under the Internet environment.
Market segmentation is one of the ways in which such
knowledge can be represented. It attempts to discover the
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 2 2260 3324; fax: +82 2 2260 3684.
E-mail address: kjkim@dongguk.edu (K.-j. Kim).
according to the information available (Velido, Lisboa, &
Meehan, 1999). It can be the basis for effective targeting
and predicting prospects through the identification of the
proper segments. Although much of the marketing litera-
ture has proposed various market segmentation techniques,
clustering techniques are frequently used in practice (Wedel
& Kamakura, 1998). In addition, K-means clustering is
the most frequently used market segmentation technique
among the clustering techniques (Gehrt & Shim, 1998;
Kuo, Chang, & Chien, 2004). However, the major draw-
back of K-means clustering is that it often falls in local
optima and the result largely depends on the initial cluster
centers. Prior studies pointed out this limitation and tried
to integrate K-means clustering and global search tech-
niques including genetic algorithms (see Babu & Murty,
1993; Kuo, Liao, & Tu, 2005; Maulik & Bandyopadhyay,
2000; Murthy & Chowdhury, 1996; Pena, Lozano, & Lar-
ranaga, 1999).

0957-4174/$ - see front matter  2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2006.12.025
 K.-j. Kim, H. Ahn / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1200–1209
In this paper, we try to apply hybrid K-means clustering
and genetic algorithms to carry out an exploratory segmen-
tation of an online shopping market. To find the most
effective clustering method for those kinds of data, we
adopt a number of clustering methods and compare the
performance of each clustering method by using our
suggested performance criteria. In addition, we validate
the usefulness of our proposed model in a real-world
application.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: the next
section reviews two traditional clustering algorithms, K-
means and self-organizing map (SOM), along with the per-
formance criteria. Section 3 proposes the GA approach to
optimize the K-means clustering and Section 4 describes the
data and the experiments. In this section, the empirical
results are also summarized and discussed. In the final sec-
tion, conclusions and the limitations of this study are
presented.
2. Clustering algorithms
Cluster analysis is an effective tool in scientific or man-
agerial inquiry. It groups a set of data in d-dimensional fea-
ture space to maximize the similarity within the clusters
and minimize the similarity between two different clusters.
There are various clustering methods and they are cur-
rently widely used. Among them, we apply two popular
methods, K-means and SOM, and a novel hybrid method
to market segmentation. Before providing a brief descrip-
tion of each method, the following assumptions are neces-
sary. A given population consists of n elements described
by m attributes and it is partitioned into K clusters.
Xi = (xi1, xi2, . . . ,xim) represents the vector of the m attri-
butes of element i.
2.1. K-means clustering algorithm
The K-means method is a widely used clustering proce-
dure that searches for a nearly optimal partition with a
fixed number of clusters. It uses an iterative hill-climbing
algorithm. The process of K-means clustering is as follows:
(1) The initial seeds with the chosen number of clusters,
K, are selected and an initial partition is built by
using the seeds as the centroids of the initial clusters.
(2) Each record is assigned to the centroid that is nearest,
thus forming a cluster.
(3) Keeping the same number of clusters, the new cen-
troid of each cluster is calculated.
(4) Iterate Step (2) and (3) until the clusters stop chang-
ing or stop conditions are satisfied.
The K-means algorithm has been popular because of its
easiness and simplicity for application. However, it also has
some drawbacks. First, it does not deal well with overlap-
ping clusters and the clusters can be pulled out of center by
outliers. Also, the clustering result may depend on the ini-
1201
tial seeds, but there is no mechanism to optimize the initial
seeds. In addition, it may converge to a local minimum
under certain conditions because it works as a hill-climbing
strategy. As described in the next section, GA can find opti-
mal clusters by minimizing the extrinsic clustering metric.
2.2. Self-organizing map (SOM)
SOM is the clustering algorithm based on the unsuper-
vised neural network model. Since it was suggested by
Kohonen (1982), it has been applied to many studies
because of its good performance. The basic SOM model
consists of two layers, an input layer and an output layer.
When the training set is presented to the network, the val-
ues flow forward through the network to units in the out-
put layer. The neurons in the output layer are arranged
in a grid, and the units in the output layer compete with
each other, and the one with the highest value wins. The
process of SOM is as follows:
(1) Initialize the weights as random small numbers.
(2) Put an input sample, Xi, into the SOM network, and
the distances between weight vectors, Wj = (wj1,
wj2, . . . ,wjm), and the input sample, Xi, are calculated.
Then, select the neuron whose distance with Xi is the
shortest, as in Eq. (1). The selected neuron would be
called the ‘winner’
X 2
Min DðjÞ ¼ ðwji  xi Þ : ð1Þ
i
(3) Update the weights of the winner as well as its neigh-
bors by the following equation when a is assumed to
be the learning rate
W NEW ¼ W j þ akX i  W j k: ð2Þ
j
(4) Iterate Steps (2) and (3) until the stop criterion is
satisfied.
In spite of several excellent applications, SOM has some
limitations that hinder its performance. Especially, just like
other neural network based algorithms, SOM has no mech-
anism to determine the number of clusters, initial weights
and stopping conditions.
2.3. Criteria for performance comparison of clustering
algorithms
We compare the performance of the clustering algo-
rithms using ‘intraclass inertia’. Intraclass inertia is a mea-
sure of how compact each cluster is in the m-dimensional
space of numeric attributes. It is the average of the dis-
tances between the means and the observations in each
cluster. Eq. (3) represents the equation for the intraclass
inertia for the given K clusters (Michaud, 1997)
1X 1XXX m
F ðkÞ ¼ nK I K ¼ ðX iP  X KP Þ ð3Þ
n K n K i2CK P ¼1
1202 K.-j. Kim, H. Ahn / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1200–1209
where n is the number of total observations, CK is set of the
Kth cluster, XiP is the value of the attribute P for observa-
tion i, and X KP is the mean
P of the attribute P in the Kth
cluster that is X KP ¼ n1K i2CK X iP .
3. GA K-means clustering algorithm
As indicated in Section 2.1, the K-means algorithm does
not have any mechanism for choosing appropriate initial
seeds. However, selecting different initial seeds may gener-
ate huge differences in clustering results, especially when
the target sample contains many outliers. In addition, ran-
dom selection of initial seeds often causes the clustering
quality to fall into local optimization (Bradley & Fayyad,
1998). So, it is very important to select appropriate initial
seeds in the traditional K-means clustering method. To
overcome this critical limitation, we propose GA as the
optimization tool of the initial seeds in the K-means algo-
rithm. We call our proposed model the GA K-means clus-
tering method.
Genetic algorithms are stochastic search techniques that
can search large and complicated spaces. It is based on
biology including natural genetics and evolutionary princi-
ple. In particular, GAs are suitable for parameter optimiza-
tion problems with an objective function subject to various
hard and soft constraints (Shin & Han, 1999). The GA
basically explores a complex space in an adaptive way,
guided by the biological evolution of selection, crossover,
and mutation. This algorithm uses natural selection – sur-
vival of the fittest – to solve optimization problems (Kim,
2004).
The first step of the GA is problem representation. The
problem must be represented in a suitable form to be han-
dled by the GA. Thus, the problem is described in terms of
genetic code, like DNA chromosomes. The GA often
works with a form of binary coding. If the problems are
coded as chromosomes, a population – a set of chromo-
somes – is initialized. Each chromosome within a popula-
tion gradually evolves through biological operations.
There are no general rules for determining the population
size. But, population sizes of 100–200 are commonly used
in GA research. Once the population size is chosen, the ini-
tial population is randomly generated (Bauer, 1994). After
the initialization step, each chromosome is evaluated by a
fitness function. According to the value of the fitness func-
tion, the chromosomes associated with the fittest individu-
als will be reproduced more often than those associated
with unfit individuals (Davis, 1994).
The GA works with three operators that are iteratively
used. The selection operator determines which individuals
may survive (Hertz & Kobler, 2000). The crossover opera-
tor allows the search to fan out in diverse directions look-
ing for attractive solutions, and permits chromosomal
material from different parents to be combined in a single
child. There are three popular crossover methods: single-
point, two-point, and uniform. The single-point crossover
makes only one cut in each chromosome and selects two
adjacent genes on the chromosome of a parent. The two-
point crossover involves two cuts in each chromosome.
The uniform crossover allows two parent strings to
produce two children. It permits great flexibility in the
way strings are combined. In addition, the mutation oper-
ator arbitrarily alters one or more components of a selected
chromosome. Mutation randomly changes a gene on a
chromosome. It provides the means for introducing new
information into the population. Finally, the GA tends to
converge on an optimal or near-optimal solution through
these operators (Wong & Tan, 1994).
The GA is popularly used to improve the performance
of artificial intelligence techniques. Recently, the GA has
been employed to mitigate the limitations of typical cluster-
ing algorithms including the K-means algorithm. Lletı́,
Ortiz, Sarabia, and Sánchez (2004) proposed the use of
the integrated genetic algorithm and K-means clustering
to select relevant input variables. The method proposed
in their study was based on the use of GA to select those
variables important for clarifying the presence of groups
in data. Other studies tried to integrate GA and the K-
means algorithm for overcoming the drawback of the pos-
sibility of convergence in a local minimum solution (see
Babu & Murty, 1993; Kuo, An, Wang, & Chung, 2006;
Maulik & Bandyopadhyay, 2000; Murthy & Chowdhury,
1996; Pena et al., 1999).
3.1. The process of the GA K-means algorithm
GA K-means uses GA to select optimal or sub-optimal
initial seeds in K-means clustering. Fig. 1 shows the overall
framework of GA K-means clustering.
The detailed explanation on the process of GA K-means
clustering is as follows:
(1) In the first step, the system generates the initial pop-
ulation that would be used to find global optimum
initial seeds. The values of the chromosomes for the
population are initiated into random values before
the search process. To enable GA to find the optimal
initial seeds, we should design the structure of a chro-
mosome properly as a form of binary strings. A
detailed explanation on chromosome design is pre-
sented in Section 3.2.
(2) The second step is the process of K-means clustering,
which is mentioned in Section 2.1. In our study, the
maximum number of iterations for centroid adjust-
ment in K-means is set at 10. After the process of
K-means, the value of the fitness function is updated.
To find optimal initial seeds, we applied ‘intraclass
inertia’ as a fitness function. That is, the objective
of our GA K-means is to find the initial seeds where
intraclass intertia is minimized after K-means cluster-
ing finishes.
(3) In this stage, GA performs genetic operations such as
selection, crossover and mutation, on the current
population. By doing this, a new generation is pro-
 K.-j. Kim, H. Ahn / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1200–1209 1203

1. Design the structure of chromosomes

2. Generate the initial population

and define fitness function

User 3. Perform the K-means process

Data Base according to the given initial seeds

4. Calculate the intraclass inertia

as fitness function for each chromosome

5. Apply genetic operators

and produce a new generation

No
6. Satisfy
the stopping criteria?

Yes

7. Finish

Fig. 1. The overall framework of GA K-means.

duced. After that, Step (2) and (3) are repeated until
the stopping conditions are satisfied.
3.2. Chromosome encoding
The system searches the space to find optimal or near-
optimal values of the features that consist of the centroids
for each cluster. To apply GA to search for these optimal
values, they have to be coded on a chromosome, a form
of binary strings. The structure of the chromosomes for
GA K-means is presented in Fig. 2.
As shown in Fig. 2, the length of each chromosome for
GA K-means depends on the types of features. In the case
of the binary selection variables whose value is 0 or 1, the
length of each feature is just 1 bit. But, the features that
have continuous values require more bits to express them

Types of the features consist of the data set

Type 1. Binary selection (0 or 1)

V1
1

Type 2. Continuous values ranging from 0 to 1

V2
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

V1 V2 … V36 V37 … V42

1 1 … 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 … 1 2 … 14

Cluster 1 1 0 … 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 … 1 1 … 0

Cluster 2 0 1 … 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 … 0 1 … 0

Cluster 3 1 1 … 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 … 1 1 … 1

… 1 0 … 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 … 0 0 … 1

Cluster n 1 1 … 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 … 1 0 … 0

Fig. 2. The structures of the chromosomes for GA K-means.

1204 K.-j. Kim, H. Ahn / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1200–1209
in a chromosome. Here, we set the continuous feature val-
ues as precise as 1/10,000. When we apply min–max
normalization to the continuous features, they become
the values ranging from 0 to 1. In this case, 14 binary bits
are required to express them with 1/10,000th precision
because 8192 = 213 < 10000 6 214 = 16384. These 14 bit
binary numbers are transformed into decimal floating
numbers, ranging from 0 to 1 by applying the following
equation (4):
x x
x0 ¼ 14 ¼ ð4Þ
2  1 16383
where x is the decimal number of the binary code for each
feature weight (Michalewicz, 1996).
For example, the binary code for the value of the 37th
feature of the first sample chromosome – the chromosome
represents Cluster 1 – in Fig. 2 is (10110010010110)2. The
decimal value of it is (11414)10 and it is interpreted as
11414
16383
¼ 0:696697796  0:6967.
In this study, we use a real-world data set from an Inter-
net shopping mall that consists of 36 selection variables
and 6 continuous variables. For the design of the chromo-
some for this data set, (36 · 1 + 6 · 14) · K bits are
required where K is the number of clusters.
4. Experimental design and results
4.1. Experimental design
We adopt three clustering algorithms – simple K-means,
SOM and GA K-means – to our data. We try to segment
the Internet users into 5 clusters (that is, K = 5). In the case
of SOM, we set the learning rate (a) at 0.5.
For the controlling parameters of the GA search, the
population size is set at 200 organisms. The value of the
crossover rate is set at 0.7 while the mutation rate is set
Fig. 3. The system architecture of the recommendation system.
at 0.1. This study performs the crossover using a uniform
crossover routine. The uniform crossover method is consid-
ered better at preserving the schema, and can generate any
schema from the two parents, while single-point and two-
point crossover methods may bias the search with the irrel-
evant position of the features. For the mutation method,
this study generates a random number between 0 and 1
for each of the features in the organism. If a gene gets a
number that is less than or equal to the mutation rate, then
that gene is mutated. As the stopping condition, only 4000
trials (20 generations) are permitted.
Simple K-means was conducted by SPSS for Windows
11.0 and SOM by Neuroshell 2 R4.0. GA K-means was
developed by using Microsoft Excel 2002 and Palisade
Software’s Evolver Version 4.06. And, the K-means algo-
rithm for GA K-means was implemented in VBA (Visual
Basic for Applications) of Microsoft Excel 2002.
4.2. Experimental results
In this study, we used real-world Internet shopping mall
data for assessing the performance of the proposed model.
The research data was collected from an online diet portal
site in Korea which contains all kinds of services for online
diets such as providing information, community services
and a shopping mall. In the case of a diet shopping mall,
customers generally have a clear objective, and they have
a strong demand for personalized care and services. Thus,
they are usually open-minded about providing their per-
sonal information to get appropriate service. As a result,
the target company of our research possesses detailed and
accurate customer information, and it has a desire to use
the information as a source of direct marketing for selling
their products. Consequently, we tried to build a recom-
mendation model for the users of this web site.
 K.-j. Kim, H. Ahn / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1200–1209 1205

There are two prevalent approaches for recommenda-
tion – collaborative filtering (CF) and content-based (CB)
methods. Both approaches have weaknesses as well as
strengths. However, CF has been used more frequently in
real-world applications.
CF works by collecting user feedback in the form of rat-
ings for items in a given domain and exploiting similarities
and differences among profiles of several users in determin-
ing how to recommend items. In general, CF can make
accurate recommendations in homogeneous domains,
and it requires lower computational complexity when the
amount of the collected data set is small. Moreover, it
can recommend items in novel territories because it deter-
mines items to be recommended by considering only
similarity between users, not characteristics of products
(Konstan et al., 1997; Pazzani, 1999).
Nonetheless, it also has many critical limitations. Usu-
ally, it cannot recommend newly added items, and requires
high computational complexity as the user base increases.
Moreover, it mainly relies on annotations by users and pro-
vides meaningless results in heterogeneous domains such as
food. However, the most critical problem is that it cannot
make any recommendations when customers have not
bought items repeatedly, which is generally called the ‘spar-
sity problem’ (Cho & Kim, 2004; Cho, Kim, & Kim, 2002;
Good et al., 1999; Herlocker, Konstan, & Riedl, 2000;
Kim, Cho, Kim, Kim, & Suh, 2002; Resnick, Iacovou,
Suchak, & Bergstrom, 1994).
These limitations are very critical in particular for Inter-
net shopping malls with specialized items. In the case of
our target shopping mall which is specialized for dieters,
80.44% of total buyers had purchased just one time at

Table 1
Features and their descriptions
Code Description Range
AGE Age Continuous (yrs)
ADD0 Residences are located in Seoul (the capital of South Korea) 0: False/1: True
ADD1 Residences are located in big cities 0: False/1: True
ADD2 Residences are located in the places other than Seoul and big cities 0: False/1: True
OCCU0 Customers work for companies 0: False/1: True
OCCU1 Customers are housewives 0: False/1: True
OCCU2 Customers are students 0: False/1: True
OCCU3 Customers run their own businesses 0: False/1: True
OCCU4 Customers are jobless 0: False/1: True
SEX Gender 0: Male/1: Female
MARRIED Customers got married 0: False/1: True
LOSS1 Customers’ need to lose weight around their bellies 0: Not exist/1: Exist
LOSS2 Customers’ need to lose weight around their hips 0: Not exist/1: Exist
LOSS3 Customers’ need to lose weight around their waists 0: Not exist/1: Exist
LOSS4 Customers’ need to lose weight around their faces 0: Not exist/1: Exist
LOSS5 Customers’ need to lose weight around their backs 0: Not exist/1: Exist
LOSS6 Customers’ need to lose weight around their legs and thighs 0: Not exist/1: Exist
LOSS7 Customers’ need to lose weight around their arms 0: Not exist/1: Exist
LOSS8 Customers’ need to lose weight around their chests 0: Not exist/1: Exist
LOSS9 Customers’ need to lose weight around their shoulders 0: Not exist/1: Exist
PUR0 Customers diet for beauty 0: False/1: True
PUR1 Customers diet for urgent purpose such as employment, marriage 0: False/1: True
PUR2 Customers diet for the reasons other than PUR0, PUR1 0: False/1: True
HEIGHT Height Continuous (m)
WEIGHT Weight Continuous (kg)
WAIST Waist Continuous (inch)
OBJ Customers’ target weight to reduce Continuous (kg)
BMI Body mass index (BMI) is the measure of body fat based on height and weight that applies Continuous (kg/m2)
weight ðkgÞ
to both adult men and women. It is calculated as follows: BMI ðkg=m2 Þ ¼ ðheight ðmÞÞ2
D1 Customers experienced ‘edema’ 0: False/1: True
D2 Customers experienced ‘constipation’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
D3 Customers experienced ‘hypertension’ or ‘high blood fat’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
D4 Customers experienced ‘anemia’ or ‘malnutrition’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
E01 Prior experience with ‘functional diet food’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
E02 Prior experience with ‘diet drugs’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
E03 Prior experience with ‘diuretics’ or the drugs generating ‘diarrhea’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
E04 Prior experience with ‘hunger’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
E05 Prior experience with ‘folk remedies’ such as ‘one food diet’ and ‘Denmark diet’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
E06 Prior experience with ‘fasting treatment’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
E07 Prior experience with ‘diet clinic’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
E08 Prior experience with ‘oriental diet treatment’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
E09 Prior experience with ‘toning system’ 0: Not exist/1: Exist
E10 Prior experience with other diet methods other than E01-E09 0: Not exist/1: Exist
1206 K.-j. Kim, H. Ahn / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1200–1209

the time of this research. Thus, it is impossible to apply CF order to predict the items which are likely to be purchased
in our target shopping mall because the buying behavior of by users. However, CBR also has a limitation that is simi-
the customers cannot be patternized. Consequently, we lar to CF – that is the requirement of high computational
applied a simple case-based reasoning (CBR) model in complexity as the user base increases. To resolve the prob-
lem, clustering methods have been applied as a preprocess-
ing tool for CBR (Kim & Han, 2001). In this study, we
Table 2
used our proposed clustering algorithm – GA K-means –
Intraclass inertia of each clustering method
as a preprocessing tool for CBR. Fig. 3 shows the system
Clustering method K-means SOM GA K-means
architecture of the recommendation system using GA K-
Intraclass inertia 2.1467 2.1340 2.1288 means and CBR.
The collected data in this case included 3298 customers.
It contained users’ demographic variables and the items
Table 3 that they had purchased. We collected totally 42 indepen-
t-values of the paired-samples t-test dent variables including demographic and other personal
SOM GA K-means information. Table 1 presents detailed information on the
K-means 5.534a 8.233a features.
SOM 3.588a In order to determine the most appropriate clustering
a
Significant at the 1% level. algorithm for this data set, we also applied simple K-means,

Table 4 Table 5
The result of Chi-square analysis The result of ANOVA

Code K-means SOM GA K-means Code K-means SOM GA K-means

Chi- Asy. Chi- Asy. Chi- Asy. F- Asy. F- Asy. F- Asy.

square Sig. square Sig. square Sig. value Sig. value Sig. value Sig.
value value value AGE 93.444 0.000 209.880 0.000 217.018 0.000
ADD0 96.368 0.000 1348.831 0.000 10.235 0.037 HEIGHT 31.631 0.000 22.773 0.000 23.624 0.000
ADD1 13.468 0.009 270.957 0.000 9.278 0.055 WEIGHT 23.181 0.000 26.752 0.000 29.990 0.000
ADD2 148.332 0.000 516.466 0.000 14.492 0.006 OBJ 19.671 0.000 21.144 0.000 23.581 0.000
OCCU0 57.055 0.000 12.248 0.016 72.685 0.000 BMI 37.419 0.000 41.808 0.000 54.352 0.000
OCCU1 450.737 0.000 83.418 0.000 167.636 0.000 WAIST 25.189 0.000 31.245 0.000 40.390 0.000
OCCU2 1079.419 0.000 372.907 0.000 1458.239 0.000
OCCU3 1.937 0.747 13.663 0.008 20.005 0.000
OCCU4 603.448 0.000 202.115 0.000 727.388 0.000
SEX 167.612 0.000 214.696 0.000 184.098 0.000
MARRIED 661.327 0.000 216.406 0.000 351.134 0.000
LOSS1 757.606 0.000 478.591 0.000 593.393 0.000
LOSS2 445.300 0.000 390.210 0.000 416.854 0.000
LOSS3 1075.998 0.000 724.511 0.000 740.688 0.000
LOSS4 380.218 0.000 443.821 0.000 473.003 0.000
LOSS5 696.827 0.000 1305.146 0.000 1189.162 0.000
LOSS6 339.398 0.000 414.516 0.000 377.712 0.000
LOSS7 646.072 0.000 658.696 0.000 611.935 0.000
LOSS8 220.424 0.000 389.492 0.000 447.096 0.000
LOSS9 522.761 0.000 1145.626 0.000 1065.225 0.000
PUR0 1555.298 0.000 1666.533 0.000 1665.739 0.000
PUR1 141.533 0.000 89.095 0.000 134.972 0.000
PUR2 1772.369 0.000 1643.852 0.000 2162.927 0.000
D1 144.186 0.000 157.686 0.000 156.771 0.000
D2 96.115 0.000 169.692 0.000 99.773 0.000
D3 21.630 0.000 19.825 0.001 28.130 0.000
D4 20.424 0.000 30.589 0.000 37.742 0.000
E01 158.875 0.000 105.290 0.000 110.969 0.000
E02 237.783 0.000 113.755 0.000 97.106 0.000
E03 54.677 0.000 38.590 0.000 47.942 0.000
E04 153.452 0.000 116.398 0.000 144.575 0.000
E05 86.949 0.000 90.472 0.000 72.661 0.000
E06 27.896 0.000 15.372 0.004 17.544 0.002
E07 14.877 0.005 16.113 0.003 26.981 0.000
E08 51.238 0.000 25.048 0.000 32.696 0.000
E09 38.677 0.000 30.369 0.000 18.063 0.001
E10 27.819 0.000 18.089 0.001 21.357 0.000
Fig. 4. Clustering result of GA K-means.
 K.-j. Kim, H. Ahn / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1200–1209 1207

Fig. 5. Sample screens of the prototype system (a) The input screen. (b) The result screen for recommendation.

SOM, and GA K-means all together, and focused on finding Table 6

the algorithm which produced the best result. We used The result of the survey
intraclass inertia as a performance measure. Table 2 shows Recommendation method Average Standard deviation
the summarized performance of the three methods. As you Randomly-chosen model 3.76 1.342
can see, GA K-means is the best among three comparative Proposed model (GA K-means + CBR) 4.51 1.010
methods for this data set.
To determine whether the differences of intraclass inertia
between the proposed model and other comparative mod- for paired samples. As explained in Section 2.3, intraclass
els are statistically significant or not, we applied the t-test inertia is the mean of the distances between the cluster
1208 K.-j. Kim, H. Ahn / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1200–1209
Table 7
The results of paired-samples t-test
Paired differences
Mean Standard deviation Standard error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference
Lower
0.75 1.604 0.1604 0.432
center and each sample, thus we can apply the statistical
test for comparing means of two samples. The paired-sam-
ples t-test is usually applied when the two sets of values are
from the same sample, such as in a pre-test/post-test situa-
tion. It is sometimes called the t-test for correlated samples
or dependent samples (Green, Salkind, & Akey, 2000). In
the study, the null hypothesis is H0:INi  INj = 0 where
i = 1,2 and j = 2,3, while the alternative hypothesis is
Ha:INi  INj 5 0 where i = 1,2 and j = 2,3. INk means
intraclass inertia (i.e. average distance between the cluster
center and each sample) for the clustering method k. Table
3 shows the result for paired-samples t-test. As shown in
Table 3, GA K-means outperforms all of the comparative
models including simple K-means and SOM at the 1% sta-
tistical significance level.
In addition, Chi-square analysis and ANOVA (analysis
of variance) are also applied to examine the discriminant
power of the three clustering methods. Table 4 suggests
the results of Chi-square analysis, and Table 5 presents
the results of ANOVA. These results show that the five seg-
ments by all three clustering methods differed significantly
with respect to almost all of the independent variables.
Thus, we can conclude that GA K-means may be the most
appropriate preprocessing tool for this data set. Fig. 4 dis-
plays the clustering result of GA K-means with two vari-
ables (AGE and WAIST), indicating that there are
clearly five clusters.
Using the result from GA K-means clustering and the
CBR algorithm, we constructed the recommendation sys-
tem for the target shopping mall. The system was devel-
oped as a Web-based system using Microsoft ASP (active
server pages). Fig. 5 shows the sample screens for our pro-
totype system.
To validate the usefulness of the recommendation model
using GA K-means and CBR, our prototype system
generated two kinds of recommendation results – one
was generated randomly and the other was generated using
our model that combined GA K-means and CBR. The
sequence of the visual presentation of these two results
changed randomly in order to offset main testing effect –
the effect of a prior observation on a later observation.
For measuring satisfaction of each recommendation result,
we added a survey function that measured the satisfaction
level in a 7-point Likert scale. Using the prototype system,
we conducted the survey for one month (April, 2005). As a
result, we collected 100 responses in total. Table 6 shows
the result of the survey. As shown in Table 6, the respon-
dents replied that they were quite satisfied (4.51 point) with
the recommended results by our proposed model, although
t-Value Degree of freedom Sig. level (2-tails)
Upper
1.068 4.675 99 0.0000
they felt the randomly recommended results were mediocre
(3.76 point).
To examine whether the difference of the satisfaction
levels of the two recommended results is statistically signif-
icant or not, we applied the paired-samples t-test. In the
test, the null hypothesis was H0:l1  l2 = 0 while the alter-
native hypothesis was Ha:u1  l2 5 0 where l1 was the sat-
isfaction level of the proposed model and l2 was the level
for the random model. Table 7 shows the results for
paired-samples t-test.
As shown in Table 7, the satisfaction level of the pro-
posed model is higher than the level of the random model
at the 1% statistical significance level. This shows that GA
K-means, as a preprocessing tool for a prediction model
like CBR, may support satisfactory results, and also
reduces search space for training.
5. Conclusions
This study suggests a new clustering algorithm, GA
K-means. We applied it to a real-world case for market seg-
mentation in electronic commerce, and found that GA
K-means might result in better segmentation than other tra-
ditional clustering algorithms including simple K-means
and SOM from the perspective of intraclass inertia. In addi-
tion, we empirically examined the usefulness of GA K-
means as a preprocessing tool for recommendation model.
However, this study has some limitations. Although we
suggest intraclass inertia as a criterion for performance
comparison, it is uncertain that this is a complete measure
for performance comparison of the clustering algorithms.
Consequently, the efforts to develop effective measures to
compare clustering algorithms should be done in the future
research.
Moreover, we arbitrarily set the number of clusters to
five in this study. Unfortunately, there have been few stud-
ies to propose any mechanism to determine the optimal
number of clusters, so it has usually been determined by
heuristics. Thus, the attempts to adjust the number of clus-
ters should be one of the focuses of future research. In
addition, GA K-means needs to be applied to other
domains in order to validate generalizability of the pro-
posed model.
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