A modified aspect model for simulation analysis

This paper proposes a new latent class model to represent user segments in a marketing model of electric commerce sites. The aspect model proposed by T. Hofmann is well known and is also called the probabilistic latent semantic indexing (PLSI) model. Although the aspect model is one of effective models for information retrieval, it is difficult to interpret the meaning of the probability of latent class in terms of marketing models. It is desirable that the probability of latent class means the size of customer segment for the purpose of marketing research. Through this formulation, the simulation analysis to dissect the several situations become possible by using the estimated model. The impact of the strategy that we contact to the specific customer segment and make effort to increase the number of customers belonging to this segment can be predicted by using the model demonstrating the size of customer segment. This paper proposes a new model whose probability parameter of latent variable means the rate of users with the same preference in market. By applying the proposed model to the data of an internet portal site for job hunting, the effectiveness of our proposal is verified.