Online product decision support using sentiment analysis and fuzzy cloud-based multi-criteria model through multiple e-commerce platforms

Abstract

The competitive landscape of multiple e-commerce platforms and the vast amount of product reviews associated with these platforms have supported both consumers’ online shopping decision making and also served as a reference for product attribute performance improvement. This paper proposes a sentiment-driven fuzzy cloud multi-criteria model for online product ranking and performance to provide purchase recommendations. In this novel model, Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory Network-Conditional Random Fields (BiLSTM-CRF), sentiment analysis, and K-means clustering are first integrated to mine product attributes and compute sentiment values based on reviews from various platforms. Next, considering the confidence of the sentiment value, the cloud model is combined with q-rung orthopair fuzzy sets to define the new concept of the q-rung orthopair fuzzy cloud (q-ROFC) and the interaction operational laws between q-ROFCs are given. The sentiment values of each product attribute from different platforms are cross-combined and transformed into a type of q- ROFC, while multiple interactive information matrices are established. To investigate the correlation among homogeneous attributes, the q-ROFC interaction weighted partitioned Maclaurin Symmetric mean operator is proposed. Finally, we provide real-world examples of online mobile phone ranking and attribute performance evaluation. The results show that our proposed method offers significant advantages in dealing with customer purchase decisions for online products and problems with performance direction identification. Managerial implications are discussed.