User profiling homework - need some help

[jdgrcorp]

Hello all,

I need some help here! I want to find a way to do this:
in an e-shop (not a real one just for a homework!) I want when a non registered user add items in his basket to have a php code that will understand the kind of user. For example
if the user add a pink tennis ball the code will understand that the user might be a woman and that might like sports. If user add a car fluid code will understand that the user has a car.
If user add in his basket a baby cream code will understand that user has a baby. So all the data the code will collect will be displayed somewhere in the page. For example: user is man, have car, have baby, between 30-50 years old. And somewhere in page will be a ads based to these results. For example user will see an advertising for baby food, or for a car product.

I need to make that for a homework, but I don’t really know from where to start, can someone help me? Any help would be fine because I don’t know from where to start! This thing called user profiling.

Thanks!

[astonecipher]

That is interesting homework, it typically falls under Machine Learning, not web development though.

[jdgrcorp]

hmm it will be in php thats why I hope to find some help here

[JimL]

Well, the concept is quite simple, but can be expanded upon almost indefinitely (which makes it a good assignment).

Basically you just need to set up some rules and compare user actions to them to get some kind of result set you can try to make sense of. Ie a user has 3x "is female and 13x “is male” then you can assume it’s a guy. Then you can store rules, profile matches, etc in a database to query. As said, you can pretty much go as far as you’d like with this.

[ErnieAlex]

A few comments on this subject… First, you do not have any way to really know the sex of who buys a certain
type of product. Quite often it might be for a gift. But, one thing you can be 100% sure of is if the user is a
man or woman. Since you may ask that question when they register. At that point, you know which is buying
a product. You can rate all products based on how they are purchased. By a man or woman. In that way, you
can just create a rating value telling who has purchased a product. I suspect that you could attach a value to
each product that states which is likely to purchase that product, but, that would just be a guess. It would not
be a real live profile of who is buying the item.

Also, this comes to the advertisement issues. Some adverts are much better than others. You would also want
to track which ones produce the most user-clicks and use them more often than the others. Profile tracking
is tricky and is attached the individual site. I am sure I might buy a pink tennis ball for my niece. You might
need to think out why you need to track it based on the item and not on the sales of the item.

(Homework or not, thinking the full scope of a project is best.) Ask further questions and we can help…