Patent ID: 8380583

Claim:
A system for extrapolating item characteristics to improve recommendations related to behaviorally-deficient items, the system comprising: an item data repository comprising physical computer storage, the item data repository storing item data representative of a plurality of items in an electronic catalog, the plurality of items comprising first items having a characteristic and second items not known to have the characteristic; an association mining module operative to programmatically analyze the item data to generate substitution associations between first ones of the plurality of items and behavioral associations between second ones of the plurality of items; a characteristic extrapolation module operative to programmatically extrapolate the characteristic from at least some of the first items known to have the characteristic to at least some of the second items not known to have the characteristic based at least partly on a strength of the substitution associations, wherein the characteristic extrapolation module is further configured to extrapolate the characteristic by propagating the item characteristic through a directed graph, the directed graph comprising nodes and edges connecting the nodes, each of the nodes representing one of the plurality of items and being associated with a characteristic value that represents the characteristic, each of the edges representing one of the substitution associations, wherein the characteristic extrapolation module propagates the characteristic by at least updating the characteristic values of the nodes based at least in part on the strength of the substitution associations represented by the edges connecting the nodes; and a recommendations module operative to generate for a user item recommendations that do not have the characteristic, the recommendations module configured to: (1) access a selected item from user activity data corresponding to the user, the selected item having a deficiency of behavioral data, (2) access one or more substitute items having substitution associations with the selected item, (3) access one or more behavioral items having behavioral associations with the one or more substitute items, and (4) select at least a portion of the behavioral items to recommend to the user that do not have the extrapolated characteristic.