Single-Item Fashion Recommender: Towards Cross-Domain Recommendations

Nowadays, recommender systems and search engines play an integral role in fashion e-commerce. Still, many challenges lie ahead, and this study tries to tackle some. This article first suggests a content-based fashion recommender system that uses a parallel neural network to take a single fashion item shop image as input and make in-shop recommendations by listing similar items available in the store. Next, the same structure is enhanced to personalize the results based on user preferences. This work then introduces a background augmentation technique that makes the system more robust to out-of-domain queries, enabling it to make street-to-shop recommendations using only a training set of catalog shop images. Moreover, the last contribution of this paper is a new evaluation metric for recommendation tasks called objective-guided human score. This method is an entirely customizable framework that produces interpretable, comparable scores from subjective evaluations of human scorers.

K-Splits: Improved K-Means Clustering Algorithm to Automatically Detect the Number of Clusters

This paper introduces k-splits, an improved hierarchical algorithm based on k-means to cluster data without prior knowledge of the number of clusters. K-splits starts from a small number of clusters and uses the most significant data distribution axis to split these clusters incrementally into better fits if needed. Accuracy and speed are two main advantages of the proposed method. We experiment on six synthetic benchmark datasets plus two real-world datasets MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, to prove that our algorithm has excellent accuracy in finding the correct number of clusters under different conditions. We also show that k-splits is faster than similar methods and can even be faster than the standard k-means in lower dimensions. Finally, we suggest using k-splits to uncover the exact position of centroids and then input them as initial points to the k-means algorithm to fine-tune the results.