A Product Feature Inference Model for Mining Implicit Customer Preferences Within Large Scale Social Media Networks

The acquisition and mining of product feature data from online sources such as customer review websites and large scale social media networks is an emerging area of research. In many existing design methodologies that acquire product feature preferences form online sources, the underlying assumption is that product features expressed by customers are explicitly stated and readily observable to be mined using product feature extraction tools. In many scenarios however, product feature preferences expressed by customers are implicit in nature and do not directly map to engineering design targets. For example, a customer may implicitly state “wow I have to squint to read this on the screen”, when the explicit product feature may be a larger screen. The authors of this work propose an inference model that automatically assigns the most probable explicit product feature desired by a customer, given an implicit preference expressed. The algorithm iteratively refines its inference model by presenting a hypothesis and using ground truth data, determining its statistical validity. A case study involving smartphone product features expressed through Twitter networks is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.