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Modeling User Preferences and Mediating Agents in Electronic Commerce

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Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1991))

Abstract

An important ingredient in agent-mediated Electronic Commerce is the presence of intelligent mediating agents that assist Electronic Commerce participants (e.g., individual users, other agents, organisations). These mediating agents are in principle autonomous agents that will interact with their environments (e.g. other agents and web-servers) on behalf of participants who have delegated tasks to them. For mediating agents a (preference) model of participants is indispensable. In this paper, a generic mediating agent architecture is introduced. Furthermore, we discuss our view of user preference modeling and its need in agent-mediated electronic commerce. We survey the state of the art in the field of preference modeling and suggest that the preferences of electronic commerce participants can be modelled by learning from their behaviour. In particular, we employ an existing machine learning method called inductive logic programming (ILP). We argue that this method can be used by mediating agents to detect regularities in the behaviour of the involved participants and induce hypotheses about their preferences automatically. Finally, we discuss some advantages and disadvantages of using inductive logic programming as a method for learning user preferences and compare this method with other approaches.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Artificial Intelligence, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081, HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Mehdi Dastani & Catholijn M. Jonker

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, B-3001, Heverlee, Belgium

    Nico Jacobs & Jan Treur

Authors
  1. Mehdi Dastani
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  2. Nico Jacobs
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  3. Catholijn M. Jonker
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  4. Jan Treur
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, P.O.Box 80.089, 3508 TB, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Frank Dignum

  2. IIIA, CSIC Campus UAB, 08193, Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain

    Carles Sierra

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Dastani, M., Jacobs, N., Jonker, C.M., Treur, J. (2001). Modeling User Preferences and Mediating Agents in Electronic Commerce. In: Dignum, F., Sierra, C. (eds) Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1991. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44682-6_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44682-6_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41671-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44682-8

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