Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: Collaborative recommender systems; Electronic commerce; Data mining; Association rules. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis provides a novel approach to using data mining for e-commerce. The focus of our work is to apply association rule mining to collaborative recommender systems, which recommend articles to a user on the basis of other users' ratings for these articles as well as the similarities between this user's and other users' tastes. In this work, we propose a new algorithm for association rule mining specially tailored for use in collaborative recommendation. We make recommendations by exploring associations between users, associations between articles, and a combination of the two. We experimentally evaluated our approach on real data for many different parameter settings and compared its performance with that of other approaches under similar experimental conditions. Through our analysis and experiments, we have found that association rules are quite appropriate for collaborative recommendation domains and that they can achieve a performance that is comparable to current state of the art in recommender systems research.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-12-04T11:45:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Regiane_Arantes.pdf: 1085325 bytes, checksum: 5d3058e371edf09420927794e1ada4a9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-08-05 / The objective of this thesis is to identify the perception of last-year-Graduation-course students, from two private universities located in S??o Paulo, about Accountancy Class Entities actions which intend to promote valuation of the referred profession to the society and the professionals they represent. It was researched about the following Entities: CFC, CRC-SP, SINDCONT-SP, SESCON-SP, APEJESP, IBRACON and AUDIBRA, besides service marketing tools and competitive advantage, that gave support to the questionnaire building process. This is an exploratory research which made use of a questionnaire to obtain data and this data was statistically treated by Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), which is a software specialized in Social Sciences. Based on the analysis, the conclusion is that most of the students researched believes that the accountancy profession is appreciated by society and that Class Entities are developing actions that aims to increase the value of this profession by using service marketing tools and competitive strategy concepts, however, these students believe the entities need to develop more of this kind of actions to raise the value of Accountancy profession together with society and the accountancy professionals themselves. / Este trabalho tem por objetivo identificar qual ?? a percep????o dos alunos que est??o cursando o ??ltimo ano de Gradua????o em Ci??ncias Cont??beis - de duas IESs localizadas na cidade de S??o Paulo - quanto ??s atividades desenvolvidas pelos ??rg??os de classe cont??beis, as quais visam a promover a valoriza????o da referida profiss??o perante a sociedade como um todo e perante os pr??prios profissionais. Para tanto, foram abordadas algumas caracter??sticas dos ??rg??os pesquisados - sendo eles: CFC, CRC-SP, SINDCONT-SP, SESCON-SP, APEJESP, IBRACON e AUDIBRA -, al??m dos conceitos de marketing de servi??os e de estrat??gias competitivas, os quais embasaram a elabora????o do question??rio. Esta ?? uma pesquisa explorat??ria, cuja coleta de dados foi feita com uso de question??rio, e os dados, por sua vez, foram tratados estatisticamente, por meio do Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), um software especializado em estat??sticas para as Ci??ncias Sociais. Com base nas an??lises, concluiu-se que a maioria dos respondentes acredita que a profiss??o cont??bil seja valorizada pela sociedade e que os ??rg??os de classe estejam desenvolvendo a????es que promovam a valoriza????o da profiss??o por meio da utiliza????o de ferramentas de marketing de servi??os e dos conceitos de estrat??gias competitivas. No entanto, apesar disso, os referidos alunos acreditam ser necess??rio aos ??rg??os desenvolver mais a????es que utilizem as ferramentas de marketing de servi??os e os conceitos de estrat??gias competitivas para promover a valoriza????o da profiss??o perante a sociedade como um todo e os pr??prios profissionais da ??rea.