Developing Nonlinear Customer Preferences Models for Product Design Using Opining Mining and Multiobjective PSO-Based ANFIS Approach

Online customer reviews can clearly show the customer experience, and the improvement suggestions based on the experience, which are helpful to product optimization and design. However, the research on establishing a customer preference model based on online customer reviews is not ideal, and the following research problems are found in previous studies. Firstly, the product attribute is not involved in the modelling if the corresponding setting cannot be found in the product description. Secondly, the fuzziness of customers’ emotions in online reviews and nonlinearity in the models were not appropriately considered. Thirdly, the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is an effective way to model customer preferences. However, if the number of inputs is large, the modelling process will be failed due to the complex structure and long computational time. To solve the above-given problems, this paper proposed multiobjective particle swarm optimization (PSO) based ANFIS and opinion mining, to build customer preference model by analyzing the content of online customer reviews. In the process of online review analysis, the opinion mining technology is used to conduct comprehensive analysis on customer preference and product information. According to the analysis of information, a new method for establishing customer preference model is proposed, that is, a multiobjective PSO based ANFIS. The results show that the introducing of multiobjective PSO method into ANFIS can effectively solve the defects of ANFIS itself. Taking hair dryer as a case study, it is found that the proposed approach performs better than fuzzy regression, fuzzy least-squares regression, and genetic programming based fuzzy regression in modelling customer preference.