applied

sciences
Article
Classification of Retail Products: From Probabilistic Ranking to
Neural Networks
Manar Mohamed Hafez 1, * , Ana Fernández Vilas 2 , Rebeca P. Díaz Redondo 2 and Héctor Olivera Pazó 2

1 College of Computing and Information Technology, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime
Transport (AASTMT)-Smart Village, Giza P.O. Box 12676, Egypt
2 AtlanTTic, Universiade de Vigo [Information & Computing Lab], 36310 Vigo, Spain;
[email protected] (A.F.V.); [email protected] (R.P.D.R.); [email protected] (H.O.P.)
* Correspondence: [email protected]

Abstract: Food retailing is now on an accelerated path to a success penetration into the digital market
by new ways of value creation at all stages of the consumer decision process. One of the most
important imperatives in this path is the availability of quality data to feed all the process in digital
transformation. However, the quality of data are not so obvious if we consider the variety of products
and suppliers in the grocery market. Within this context of digital transformation of grocery industry,
Midiadia is a Spanish data provider company that works on converting data from the retailers’
products into knowledge with attributes and insights from the product labels that is maintaining
quality data in a dynamic market with a high dispersion of products. Currently, they manually
categorize products (groceries) according to the information extracted directly (text processing) from
the product labelling and packaging. This paper introduces a solution to automatically categorize
the constantly changing product catalogue into a 3-level food taxonomy. Our proposal studies three





 different approaches: a score-based ranking method, traditional machine learning algorithms, and
Citation: Hafez, M.M.; deep neural networks. Thus, we provide four different classifiers that support a more efficient and
Fernández Vilas, A.; Redondo, R.P.D.; less error-prone maintenance of groceries catalogues, the main asset of the company. Finally, we have
Pazó, H.O. Classification of Retail compared the performance of these three alternatives, concluding that traditional machine learning
Products: From Probabilistic Ranking algorithms perform better, but closely followed by the score-based approach.
to Neural Networks. Appl. Sci. 2021,
11, 4117. https://doi.org/ Keywords: grocery industry; digital transformation; classification; deep learning; machine learning;
10.3390/app11094117 probabilistic ranking

Academic Editor: Mauro Castelli

Received: 4 March 2021

1. Introduction
Accepted: 7 April 2021
Published: 30 April 2021
According to [1], digital transformation facilitates new ways of value creation at all
stages of the consumer decision process: pre-purchase (need recognition, information
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral
search, consideration or evaluation of alternatives), the purchase (choice, ordering, pay-
with regard to jurisdictional claims in
ment), and the post-purchase (consumption, use, engagement, service requests). This value
published maps and institutional affil- creation is especially relevant given the very competitive nature of the retail market to gain
iations. a larger market share. Although digital transformation [2] is being addressed from different
fields: multi-channel solutions, user modeling, internet of things, etc. all rely to some extent
on the availability of information on operations, supply chains, and consumer and shopper
behaviors. This information is the raw material for data analysis as a central driver towards
Copyright: © 2021 by the authors.
digital transformation. Food retailing is now on an accelerated path to a success penetration
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
into the digital market and manufacturers and retailers must prepare to achieve six digital
This article is an open access article
imperatives [3,4]: (1) Integrate the digital offerings with their brick-and- mortar operations;
distributed under the terms and (2) Forecasts to increase operational efficiency; (3) Optimizing omnichannel marketing
conditions of the Creative Commons and promotions; (4) Fixing inaccurate master data and (5) a single comprehensive view of
Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// customer insights; and (6) Integrating digital and in-store shelf capabilities.
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ This paper focuses on the most supportive digital imperatives, that is, the availability
4.0/). of quality data (accurate, complete and well-maintained data) in order to feed all the visible

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11094117 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 2 of 24

processes in digital transformation. The quality of data are not so obvious if we consider
the variety of products and suppliers in the grocery market. As a remarkable example,
Walmart is the largest grocery retailer with more than 10,000 retailer units all over the
world and around 3000 suppliers and 20 million food products. In addition, the Walmart
Marketplace gives access to third party retailers who would like to offer their products
to more than 90 million unique visitors who shop on Walmart.com every month. With
this scale of locations, online users, providers, and third-party retailers, maintaining the
quality of the information is an issue to address every day. Moreover, Walmart provides
suppliers up-to-date sales data. Having the magnitude of Walmart or not, the challenge
into a successful transition into the grocery digital market is to get the right data, process it
at a high speed, and obtain some valued of it.
As well as in other sectors, like financial or consumers in general, the grocery industry
is harnessing digital means to innovate through data-drive business models. This will
allow us to optimize processes and operations as replenishment and pricing and, at the
same time, offer superior convenience in online groceries [5]. Of course, it should also be
applied in brick and mortar by redesigning their strategies towards omnichannel retailing.
The proliferation of these data drive models brings the emergence of data vendors also in
the grocery industry. Precisely, this is where Midiadia (https://www.midiadia.com/, access
on 5 March 2018) comes in. This Spanish company works on converting data from the
retailers’ products into knowledge with attributes and insights from the product labels. The
so-called MidiadiaTECH provides the retailers with deep knowledge about their stock and
the customers with a new customized shopping experience. While Midiadia extracts the
information from the labels of the products, the categorization of the products is manually
carried out. Since there are a lot of manufacturers and a lot of different sizes of shops,
there is a considerable dispersion of products. Moreover, the list of products changes
constantly, so it must be managed properly, taking into account the complex European
legislation [6] as well as the national [7] and regional [8] legislation dealing specifically with
groceries. Therefore, the main contribution of our approach is providing retail companies
with an automatic categorization solution for new products. This classification is uniquely
based on the description of each product. The methodology can be horizontally applied
to different domains assuming there is a previously known taxonomy or hierarchy of
categories. Thus, it would be applied to recruitment processes, travel decision support
systems, investment, etc.
In this context, our objective is to provide a solution to automatically categorize
the constantly changing products in the market. Being more specific, Midiadia has de-
fined a food taxonomy and our purpose is to automatically assign which is the right
variety/category for a new product. This task must be done exclusively using the infor-
mation provided by the product labeling and packaging. This would help to maintain the
Midiadia data in a more efficient and less error-prone way. With this aim, we have defined
different classifiers based on three different approaches: a score-based ranking method
(based on BM25), machine learning algorithms (such as K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), fuzzy
K-Nearest Neighbors (FKNN)), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and deep neural
networks (particularly Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP)). After comparing the results, we can
conclude that, if we offer only one value for the Variety, then FKNN is the best approach,
but if we offer two or three options (leaving the decision between them to the experts in
the company), then, the best approach is the score-based ranking method, closely followed
by FKNN.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes previous work related to
classification in retailing from a customer’s point of view; Section 3 described the dataset
provided by Midiadia; Section 4 provides an overview of the problem to be solved. Then, the
four classifiers are introduced: the score-based classifier (Section 5), the nearest neighbors’
classifier (Section 6), an extreme gradient boosting classifier (Section 7), and the neural
network classier (Section 8). Finally, Section 9 shows evaluation and results and Section 10
concludes our work.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 3 of 24

2. Related Work
Automatic retail classification is an essential task for industry, since it could reduce the
huge amount of human labor needed in the product chain, from distribution to inventory
management. Within the traditional market field (stores and supermarkets), a considerable
number of approaches in the specialized literature focus on recognizing retail products on
shelves, which means that the automatic classification approaches are usually based on the
product appearance. This will be very useful for retailers, who can audit the placement
of products, and, for costumers, who may obtain additional information about products
by taking a simple picture of the shelf. These approaches usually rely on computer vision
techniques [9–12] and face challenging issues such as the similar appearance in terms
of shape, color, texture, and the size of different products. In order to overcome these
problems, other research combines the information obtained from image analysis with
other information based on statistical methods in order to provide a fine-grained retail
product recognition and classification [13]. Advances in this area can help with logistic
problems like shelf space planning [14].
Apart from these specific problems for image analysis, there is a well-known problem
with retail products: the overwhelming amount of different products and categories in
any supermarket. A typical supermarket could have more than a thousand different
products [15], and this number increases when we talk about merging catalogues from
different supermarkets. Because of the popularization of e-commerce, this large number of
different products are usually managed through multilevel category systems. Two relevant
problems arise within this field: first, obtaining relevant information (characteristics and
description) of retail products and, second, the automatic retail classification based on this
data. Some approaches have focused on the first topic and try to automatically extract
relevant metadata from the analysis of product images [16,17]. However, retailers usually
acquire this data from suppliers and/or third parties to complete the product information
on their websites. Precisely, the research work introduced in this paper is being used by
one of these third parties, a Spanish SME (Midiadia) that offers relevant data to retailers
for their e-commerce platforms. Both retailers and third parties need to have automatic
classification systems based on the information of the retail products to have consistent
multilevel category structured data.
In [18], this problem is tackled by applying natural language processing techniques to
the text titles. One of the problems this research faces are the typical absence of grammar
rules in product titles or names, so they apply short text classification methods, such as
character embedding, to overcome this issue. In [19], a United States patent, a machine
learning classifier helps to automatically select one or more categories for a product. The
information is extracted from the metadata fields of the product description, and it is
used to enrich a recommendation engine. In [20], another United States patent, a new
method to automatically categorize a product in an electronic marketplace is provided.
It is based on parsing the category information (provided by the retailer) to obtain a first
category identifier. This information is used to search the most adequate category identifier
within the available taxonomy. This methodology takes into account information of expired
category identifiers. The authors in [21] perform an interesting analysis of text classification
and offer a solution to automated classification on e-commerce by using distributional
semantics. The idea here is to create a taxonomy by first applying a modification of the
Bag-of-Words model [22]. This approach creates feature vectors from the description of the
products and combines three types of predictors: the Path-Wise Prediction Classifier, in which
each path in the taxonomy tree is considered as a class; the Node-Wise Prediction Classifier,
in which each node in the taxonomy tree is considered as a class; and the Train Depth-Wise
Node Classifier, which combines different classifiers on each level of the taxonomy tree,
where each node represents a different class inside these sub-classifiers. There is also
an interesting and different analysis [23] that studies how shape and packaging impact
on brand status categorization, concluding that slender packages are more likely to be
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 4 of 24

categorized as high-end products (high brand status) than those in short, wide packages
(low brand status).
Deep learning technologies are also used in this field (retail) to enhance the information
analysis processes. In fact, [24] offers a survey of the most recent works in the field of
computer vision applied to automatic product recognition combined with deep learning
techniques. Other interesting analysis that supplements the previous one is the work
in [25]. Here, the authors focus on fine-grained image analysis (FGIA) combined with
deep learning to automatically assign subordinate categories in specific application fields.
Although species of birds or models of cars are explicitly mentioned, the bases might also
be applied to retail commerce as well. In the paper, the FGIA techniques are organized into
three main categories: recognition, retrieval, and generation. When dealing with natural
language, instead of images, there are also research works that apply deep learning to
deal with automatic analysis of this kind of data. For instance, in [26], the authors face the
automatic analysis of natural language to infer polarity and sentiment information from
reviews in social media. Their approach is based on vector machine, logistic regression,
and advanced deep neural network models. It explores dependency-based rules to extract
multilingual concepts from a mixture of sentences in two languages (Persian and English)
to detect subjectivity and sentiment in sentences.
Other approaches take into account the customers for gathering relevant informa-
tion about products. For instance, the authors of [27] study the influence that product
categorization and types of online stores have on customers, mainly using hypothesis
testing. The research follows three steps: the first one is a test to see if the online shopping
preferences of the customers vary according to the type of product, without taking into
account the kind of online retail store; the second step is a test on the interaction effects of
both the online store and the types of products; and the last step is a hypothesis testing,
which results in the identification of the attributes considered relevant by the customers
when they purchase retailing products. Along this line, the proposal in [28] analyzes the
prediction of customer behavior in the purchase process with machine learning techniques
used in real-world digital signage viewership data. The data were obtained from a camera
that recorded a clothing store and additional features that were added manually. In this
case, the customers can be considered in buying groups—for example, a family that is
going to purchase a product. The goal was to classify the customers in six categories: (i)
Initiator, the person from the buying group who recognizes the need and finds the product
that the group needs, (ii) Influencer, the person whose opinion has a relevant effect on
the purchase decision, (iii) User, the final customer who will use the product or service,
(iv) Decider, the one who makes the final decision about whether or not to purchase a
product, (v) Purchaser, the person who pays for the purchased product and also determines
the terms of the purchase, and (vi), Passive influencer, a member of the buying group but
is not involved in the purchase. In [29], the approach is exclusively customer-behavior
based, providing a new clustering mechanism able to organize retail products into different
categories.
In the specialized literature, there are different approaches for automatic catego-
rization of retail products. Computer vision solutions are mainly oriented to traditional
supermarkets and have to face important accuracy problems because of the huge amount
of different products and the high similarity in the packaging of products within the same
categories. In the E-commerce field, there are different needs, but automatic classification
based on product characteristics is a relevant one. The number of different products is
overwhelming, especially if we are working on combined catalogues, i.e., catalogues from
different supermarkets and retailers, as it is our case. Analyzing the product title or name
is not enough and taking into account customer behavior is not always available. Thus,
to the best of our knowledge, there are not other studies that have faced the automatic
classification problem of combined catalogues, without data from customers and only
based on the product description (name, trademark, and ingredients). Our proposal fills in
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 5 of 24

an interesting gap for third parties specialized on enriching the retailers catalogues with
smart data.

3. Dataset
The dataset used in this work is provided by Midiadia, which consists of a collection
of 31,193 products. The list of attributes considered in this study are shown in Table 1.
The European Article Number (EAN) is a standard describing a barcode symbology and
numbering system used in global trade to identify a specific retail product type, in a
specific packaging configuration, from a specific manufacturer. Category, Subcategory, and
Variety represent the 3-levels (hierarchy) the company considers to organize the catalog
into a taxonomy. Brand is an identifying name for a product manufactured by a particular
company. Finally, the other terms are coherent to the EU regulation, as follows. Just to
clarify the meaning of these terms, a sample extract (Although product attributes are in
Spanish, in the following, the translated version of fields and values are used to improve
readability) of the dataset is shown in Table 2:
• ‘Customary name’ means a name which is accepted as the name of the food by
consumers in the Member State in which that food is sold, without that name needing
further explanation.
• ‘Legal name’ means the name of food prescribed in the Union provisions applicable
to it, or, in the absence of such Union provisions, the name provided for in the laws,
regulations, and administrative provisions applicable in the Member State in which
the food is sold to the final consumer or to mass caterers.
• An ‘Ingredient’ means any substance or product, including flavorings, food additives,
and food enzymes, and any constituent of a compound ingredient, used in the man-
ufacture or preparation of food and still present in the finished product, even if in
an altered form; residues shall not be considered as ‘ingredients’. Moreover, the EU
regulation on the provision of food information to consumers.
• ‘List of ingredients’ (suitable heading which includes the word ‘ingredients’) shall
include all the ingredients of the food, in descending order of weight, as recorded at
the time of their use in the manufacture of the food.

Table 1. Product attributes in the dataset.

Field Levels Description

EAN Unique Product Number
Category 16 1st Level Category
Subcategory 62 2nd Level Category
Variety 159 3rd Level Category
Brand 3015 Product Brand
Name 11,139 Product Customary Name
Official product denomination regarding the European
Legal Name 8442
Union provisions
Ingredients List of Ingredients in the product

The dataset also includes other attributes, such as packaging size, healthy claims,
calories, etc. However, these attributes are aimed to recommend alternative or replacement
products in a specific variety, but the problem we are trying to solve is a different one:
when a new product is incorporated into the company food catalog, all the information in
the product labeling and packaging is automatically extracted, but the decision of which
Variety is the one that corresponds to the new product is currently manually done. Thus, we
need to automatically decide to which Variety a new product belongs, so we have focused
only on attributes directly related to the kind of food, discarding the others. According to
this selection, rows with blank fields in all the selected columns of Table 1 are removed.
This entails that we have worked with a dataset with 20,888 products, hereinafter the
MDD-DS (Midiadia DataSet).
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 6 of 24

Table 1 also includes the number of different values that exist in the variable considered
MDD-DS. Thus, as a categorical variable, the dataset shows 159 levels for Variety. The
fact of knowing in which upper level of categorization is each variety can be helpful for
classification purposes. Brand can bring useful information apart from the Name and Legal
Name since they are defining the kind of product. Regarding Ingredients, it is a list of
ingredients that require further processing in order to support the classification. Figure 1
shows the distribution of products per variety as well as the statistical parameters of this
distribution. The average number of products per variety is around 200, being the 1st
quartile 116.5, so that 75% of the varieties have a number of assigned products above
213 products.

Min. = 40
0.006
1st Qu. = 116.5

Median = 148

0.004 Mean = 195.4

density

3rd Qu. = 213

Max. = 830
0.002

0.000

50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600 650 700 750 800 850
Products per variety

Figure 1. Number of products per variety: Density plot.

Table 2. Extract of the MDD-DS.

Produt N. 1 2 ... 31,193

EAN 62 1292 ... 84654
Category Fresh Beverages ... Snacks and nuts
Strong Alcoholic
Subcategory Greens and Vegetables ... Nuts
Beverages
Variety Greens and Vegetables Ron ... Seeds
Mark Generics Pujol ... Facundo
Name Raw leek Golden Ron ... Gian Seeds
Golden Ron 40% Sunflower seeds
Ingredients Leek ...
vol. alc. and salt (4%)
Roasted and
LegalName Leek Ron ... salty giant
sunflower seeds

4. Proposed Model
In order to automatize the time-consuming classification process, this paper proposed
a multi-label classification methodology to map inputs (new products) to a maximum
of three labels from all the varieties considered (The number of varieties is a restriction
of the dataset). According to the scheme in Figure 2, the deployment of our solution
(bottom part of the figure) takes Name, Legal Name, and Ingredients of a new product
(NP) as input observational variables. Then, a multi-label classifier predicts the varieties’
score of NP that is the classification score for NP to be a member of each variety (class)
C1 . . . Cn in the taxonomy. The output is defined as the three varieties C1 , C2 , C3 with
higher scores. From these three varieties, the sets Top_1 = C1 ; Top_2 = {C1 , C2 } and
Top_3 = {C1 , C2 , C3 } are defined. This paper describes the methodology and experiments
to obtain the classifiers by using the MDD-DS (described in Section 3). The modeling
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 7 of 24

methodology consists of three main steps: (1) preprocessing the data and potentially
reducing their dimensionality; (2) learning the classifier model: four different classifier
models, such as score-based model, nearest-neighbors models (KNN: K-Nearest Neighbors
and FKNN: Fuzzy K-Nearest Neighbors), XGBoost model and deep learning (MLP or
Multi-Layer Perceptron Network); (3) testing the classifier models in order to compare
them and estimate the quality measures of our approach. In step (1), and in order to
apply machine learning and deep learning approaches, we include a new sub-step for
dimensionality reduction based on PCA (Principal Component Analysis).

Figure 2. Description of the proposed model definition and evaluation.

The main idea of this paper is to select the best classification algorithm for retail prod-
ucts among a wide range of possibilities that goes from probabilistic ranking approaches
to deep neural network ones. With this aim, we have selected different techniques within
each approach: a score-based model in probabilistic ranking based on the BM25 algorithm;
K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Fuzzy K-Nearest Neighbors (FKNN, a fuzzy version of the
KNN classification algorithm), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) in machine
learning; and Multi-Layer Perceptron in deep neural networks. This selection was made
taking into account the advantages of each algorithm. Consequently, BM25 was selected
because of its efficiency, since its performance is well known in different ad-hoc retrieval
tasks, especially those designed by TREC [30] (see Section 5 for further details). Within
the machine learning field, we have selected KNN and FKNN because both of them need
to perform predictions in order to learn new knowledge. Therefore, new products can be
added because they will not affect the accuracy of the algorithms [31]. In FNNN, we have
proposed to use the fuzzy memberships values of the samples to adjust the contribution
values, since this algorithm delays the decision to assign a sample to a certain class across
memberships [32,33] (see Section 6 for further details) , and XGBoost for predictive modeling
as a sturdy and efficient machine learning method for prediction. XGBoost is a boosting
algorithm that belongs to supervised learning, which is an ensemble algorithm based
on gradient boosted trees. It integrates the predictions of “weak” classifiers to achieve a
“strong” classifier (tree model) through a serial training process. It is additionally a compar-
atively new technique; however, wonderful results are achieved in several classification
tasks (see Section 7 for further details). Finally, within the deep learning area, we have
selected the MLP algorithm. This is a simple but efficient algorithm that represents a broad
family and that was used because of its ability to adaptive learn to perform tasks based
on the data provided for the initial training or experience. In addition, it is based on a
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 8 of 24

defining a decision function that it is directly obtained through training [34] (see Section 8
for further details).

Preprocessing
As previously mentioned, MDD-DS consists of 20,888 products, which is the result of
cleaning the original dataset (31,193 products) before applying the classification algorithm.
This first cleaning procedure consisted of removing all the products with no name, no
ingredients, and no legal name. After that, MDD-DS is pre-processed by extracting all
the meaningful words for the attributes ‘Name’, ‘Legal Name’ and ‘Ingredients’. For each
product p, the three attributes are merged into a single text which aims to describe the
product des( p). This description (des( p)) is obtained after a cleansing process described [35]
step by step in Algorithm 1: (i) parenthesis are transformed into blank spaces, (ii) numbers,
stop-words, punctuation, and extra spaces are removed; (iii) all letters are converted to
lowercase, and (iv) repeated strings are removed.

Algorithm 1 Preprocessing pseudocode

1: procedure P REPROCESS(MDD-DS)
2: cleaning(MDD_DS)
3: product_words[] ← new_list(m)
4: all_products_words ← new_vector (0)
5: for i ← 1 : m do
6: p ← MDD-DS[i, ]
7: des( p) ← concatenate(
8: p[Name], p[Legal Name], p[Ingredients])
9: des( p) ← transform_brackets_into_space(des( p))
10: des( p) ← transform_into_lowercase(des( p))
11: des( p) ← remove_numbers(des( p))
12: des( p) ← remove_stopwords(des( p))
13: des( p) ← remove_punctuation(des( p))
14: des( p) ← remove_extra_spaces(des( p))
15: des( p) ← split_by_spaces(des( p))
16: des( p) ← remove_duplicates(des( p))
17: des( p) ← remove_empty_words(des( p))
18: product_words[i ] ← des( p)
19: all_products_words
20: ← all_products_words ∪ des( p)
21: end for
22: end procedure

Then, words are split, and a vector of words product_words( p) is generated, an ex-
ample is shown in Table 3. Additionally, we also create the all_products_words (for all the
products in MDD-DS). This is another vector of words that contains as many elements as
different words in the products’ vectors (from the fields Name, Legal Name, and Ingredi-
ents). After preprocessing, all_products_words contains a total of 11,359 unique words, an
example is shown in Table 4.

Table 3. Examples of product_words for every p.

Product Id Product-Vector
1 [’oil’, ’olive’, ’virgin’, ...]
... ...
218 [’pepper’, ’sweet’, ’glass’, ...]
... ...
20,888 [’biochips’, ’cheese’, ’spelt’, ’oil’, ...]
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 9 of 24

Table 4. Extract from all_products_words.

[’oil’, ’olive’, ’virgin’, ’extra’, ’arbequina’, ’extraction’, ’cold’, ’filter’, ’quality’, ’high’,
’origin’, ’gluten’, ’fondant’, ’picual’, ’spanish’, ’refined’, ’e420ii’, ’e1520’, ’liquid egg’,
’gluten’, ’e501i’, ’e281’, ’powder’, ’bicarbonate’, ’fructose’, ’e218’, , ’icing’, ’e492’, ’fon-
dant’, ’aluminum’, ’e155’, . . . ]

With the information provided by the all_products_words, we obtain the product ma-
trix X [m, n], which is mathematically defined as follows. Let w ~ be the n-dimensional vector
obtained from all_products_words such that w ~ = (w1 , . . . , wn ) and ∀ k ∈ [1, . . . , n], wk is
a string ∈ all_products_words and N = dim( all_products_words) is the total number of
different meaningful words in the dataset (after cleaning).
• The product matrix X [m, n] is an MxN matrix, where each column represents a word
wi ∈ w~ , and each row represents a product p of the dataset so that M is the total
number of products
• Let ~p be the product_words[] list such that each element contains a vector ~pi , hence
~p = (~p1 , . . . , ~pm ). Likewise, ~pi = ( pi [1], . . . , pi [l ]), where l = dim( product_words[i ]),
length of the vector in the i element of the list ~p. Note that ∀ k ∈ [1, . . . , l ], pi [k] is
a string.
Therefore, (
~ [ j] ∈ ~p[i ]
1, if w
X [i, j] = (1)
~ [ j] ∈
0, if w / ~p[i ]

where
~ [ j] ∈ ~p[i ] ⇐⇒ ∃ k / ~pi [k] = w
w ~ [ j] (2)
This means that X [i, j] is 1 if the product i has the word j in its product_words[i];
otherwise, the value will be 0. For evaluation purposes, we include the variety of the
product in an additional column, as shown in Table 5.

Table 5. Example of a product matrix.

p Id ‘oil’ ‘olive’ ‘virgin’ ··· Variety

1 1 1 1 ··· ‘Virgin olive oil and extra virgin olive oil’
.. .. .. .. ... ..
. . . . .
20,888 1 0 0 ... ‘Salads’

After this data preparation, the next step is applying dimensionality reduction in
order to face the learning models based on traditional machine learning and deep neural
networks. As broadly known, dimensionality reduction improves computational efficiency
and accuracy of data analysis. Dimensionality reduction is usually performed using two
approaches: (i) Feature selection and (ii) Feature extraction. On the one hand, feature
selection [36] removes variables that are not so relevant for the problem that must be faced
(classification, clustering, prediction, etc.). There are some interesting techniques within
this field, such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) [37], Minimum Redundancy Maximum
Relevance (mRMR) [38], and Max-Relevance-Max-Distance (MRMD) [39]. On another
hand, feature extraction [40] tries to identify and to find a smaller set of features from the
available data that are relevant for the problem. This approach entails that it is possible
to reformat, combine and/or transform primary features (variables) into new ones until
a new data set only with relevant data are obtained. We have opted to this approach
(feature extraction) because our previous analysis showed correlation among the available
features, but it was not easy to perform a direct selection of relevant variables (because of
the overwhelming number of primary features).
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 10 of 24

There are some interesting techniques within this field, such as Principal Component
Analysis (PCA) [41], Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) [42], and Autoencoders [43].
PCA and LDA are both linear transformation techniques used for dimensionality reduction
and visualization, but while PCA is an unsupervised technique, LDA is a supervised one.
PCA searches for attributes with the most variation and ignores class labels. In contrast,
LDA maximizes the separation of known categories. An autoencoder is a neural network,
with as many output units as input units and at least one hidden layer that is used to
learn a representation (encoding) for a data set by training the network to avoid or ignore
signal noise. This provides a nonlinear transformation that reduces the dimensionality of
the data. The authors of [44] evaluate the performance of this technique by comparing
an autoencoder with other models that can perform a similar reduction task, such as
PCA, LDA, etc. The results showed that PCA and LDA are relatively more stable than
autoencoder (low stability implies that different results might be obtained when replicating
the experiment). To sum up, we opted for a stable reduction technique and, more precisely,
an unsupervised one that is PCA. Both stability and the absence of a training step before
applying reduction eases the deployment of automatic classification in a real retailing
scenario, where the product catalogue is intrinsically dynamic.
PCA uses an orthogonal transformation to convert a set of observations of possibly
correlated variables into a set of linearly uncorrelated variables. In addition, PCA collects
all the required features for MDD-DS, which removes correlated features [45], improves
algorithm performance [41], reduces over-fitting [46], and improves visualization [46]. To
achieve the research goal, our study compares the results obtained with different values
for PCA (400, 500, 600, 700, and 800) to select the best option (in Sections 6–8).

5. Score-Based Model
Our first approach is based on the bag-of-words BM25 model [47] (BM for Best
Matching), widely used in information retrieval to rank documents based on a query of
words. The BM25 equation considers the frequency of occurrence of the words in the
documents, smoothing out the weighting in favor of how distinctive they are:

(k + 1)c(w, D ) N − d f (w) + 0.5

∑ |D|
· log
d f (w) + 0.5
, (3)
w∈ Q∩ D c ( w, D ) + k (1 − b + b avdl )

where w is the word analyzed, c(w, D) is the number of times the word w appears in the
document D, Q is the query, N is the number of documents, D is the document analyzed,
df(w) is the number of documents that contain the word w, k is a constant with the value 1.2
(typical value obtained from TREC experimentation [30]), | D | is the total number of words
in the document D, b is a constant with the value 0.75 (typical value obtained from TREC
experimentation [30]), and avdl is the average number of words per document.
In order to apply this probabilistic model to the classification of retail products into
varieties, after obtaining the product matrix, we generate a variety matrix. This matrix will
have as many columns as different words exist in the dataset—i.e., the same number of
columns as the product matrix. The number of rows will be the same as the number of
different varieties obtained from the dataset.
• Let Y be the variety matrix (y x n).
• Let ~z be the y-dimensional vector of integers where each one represents a variety.
Thus, ~z = (z1 , . . . , zy ).
• Let ~v be the m-dimensional vector that contains an integer that represents each product
variety. Thus, ~v = (v1 , . . . , vy ).
Therefore:
Y [i, j] = ∑ X [k, j] (4)
~v[k]=~z[i ]
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 11 of 24

In Equation (4), the value of Y [i, j] will be the number of times the word j appears in
the variety i (i.e., the set of all the products belonging to it and represented by the index k),
as shown in Table 6.

Table 6. Example of a variety matrix.

‘oil’ ‘olive’ ··· ‘aromatic’

Almonds / hazelnuts 0 0 ... 0
.. .. .. ··· ..
. . . .
Virgin and Extra virgin Olive Oil 233 224 ... 0
.. .. .. ··· ..
. . . .
Juices (100%) 0 0 ··· 0

To obtain the variety V of a product, we apply the modification of the BM25 model
depicted in (Equation (5)). This equation gives a realistic smoothing when the term fre-
quency is high and rewards low-frequency words even more than the one in (Equation (3)).
We consider two modifications with regard to the original BM25 equation. First, one unit
is added to both the nominator and the denominator. The reason for the addition in the
denominator is that the term of the query may be missing in the analyzed document within
the corresponding iteration of the addition, so v f (w) can be equal to zero. Adding a unit
instead of 0.5 makes more sense in our scenario because it is more realistic to add integers
(i.e., entire words) than a rational number; the lower bound is also equal to the unit. At
the same time, the unit added to the numerator balances out the fraction. The second
modification is that the factor c(w, V ) is a constant. This is due to the fact that the word
duplicates contained in the query are removed and the terms are unique. Thus, c(w, V )
will always be equal to 1:

(k + 1)c(w, V ) N+1
∑ |v|
log(
v f (w) + 1
) (5)
w∈ P∩V c ( w, V ) + k (1 − b + b avvl )

Once the modified BM25 equation is repeated for all the varieties, the variety was
chosen as a result for a product is the one ranked the highest.

6. Nearest-Neighbors Model
The nearest neighbor (NN) [48] rule is a nonparametric method for classification based
on instances. Taking into account the problem in Figure 2, a product in the MDD-DS p
follows the definition { p1 , p2 , . . . , pn , v}, where n is the number of the aforementioned
product attributes, and v is its assigned product variety.
The KNN approach [31] classifies an unlabelled product on the majority of similar
sample products among the k-nearest neighbors in MDD-DS that are the closest to the
unlabelled product. The distances between the unlabelled product and each of the training
product samples are determined by a specific distance measure. Therefore, the variety
of new product ~p is assigned to the most common variety among its closest k training
samples according to the attributes considered in the product vectors. More formally, let
~ − p an unlabelled product, the decision rule predicts a variety v̂ for the unlabel
unlabel ~ −p
according to the variety v of the majority of its k nearest neighbors; in the case of a tie, v̂ is
given by the closest nearest neighbor that belongs to one of the tied varieties.
One of the problems for KNN is to give equivalent importance to each of the samples
to determine the class membership, neglecting the typicality among them. Alternatively,
some challenges arise for classification in a high dimensionality dataset where it is complex
to discriminate between classes. This problem is due to the fact that the number of training
samples and the increase in dimensionality grow overwhelmingly. The aforementioned
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 12 of 24

drawbacks have been addressed in the literature by Fuzzy Sets Theory to allow imprecise
knowledge to be represented and fuzzy measures to be introduced.
Consequently, FKNN is a fuzzy version of the KNN classification algorithm [32]. Fuzzy
classifiers delay the decision to assign a sample to a certain class by using memberships.
In terms of our problem in Figure 2, FKNN assigns to an unlabel_p ~ a variety’s fuzzy
~
membership (not just true or false) by taking into account the distance from unlabel_p to its
k nearest neighbors and those neighbors’ memberships for this variety. More formally:
• Variety membership is defined for each product ~p in MDD-DS with a value in [0, 1]
for each variety v. Although the details can be found in [32], the main idea is as-
signing to each product ~p a membership value for a variety v not just according to
the assigned variety (true value) but also according to the assigned variety for its k
nearest neighbors.
• Besides given an unlabeled product unlabel_p, ~ each neighboring product ~p = { p1 , p2 , . . . ,
pn , v} votes for every variety {v1 , v2 , . . . , vm } by using its variety memberships (not just
for its assigned one v). Again, the details can be found in [32], but votes are weighted
according to the inverse of the distance to unlabel_p ~ and added. The estimated variety v̂
~
for unlabel_p is the variety with the greatest combined vote.
The main benefit of using the FKNN model may not be decreasing the error rate,
but, more importantly, the model provides a degree of certainty that can be used with a
“refuse to decide” option. Therefore, objects with overlapping classes can be detected and
processed separately.
Since KNN and FKNN are computationally expensive algorithms, we apply Principal
Component Analysis (PCA) to MDD-DS to reduce its dimensionality. In our experiment,
the original set of product attributes are transformed into a smaller set (the so-called
principal components) so that the reduced dataset MDD-DS-reduced still contains most of
the information in MDD-DS. More specifically, we evaluate the performance of KNN and
FKNN applying PCA and selecting 400, 500, 600, 700, and 800 principal components. As a
result, the product matrix is replaced by a PCA-reduced matrix. Given the variance retention
for the following number of eigenvectors (400, 0.796452); (500, 0.825814); (600, 0.84735);
(700, 0.865117); (800, 0.879153), the experiments in this paper have been carried out over a
reduced dataset of 600 principal components, referred to as MDD-DS-PCA-600.

Optimal k and Distance for KNN and FKNN

The key to success in KNN and FKNN are finding the optimal value of k and the
distance function. Usually, the k parameter is chosen empirically depending on each
problem, different numbers of nearest neighbors are tested, and the parameter with the
best performance (accuracy) is chosen to define the classifier. Choosing the optimal k is
almost impossible for a variety of problems since the performance of a KNN classifier
varies significantly when changing k and the change of the distance metric used [49].
Therefore, the decision about the distance measure also plays a vital role in determining
the final result of the classification. Although Euclidean distance is the most widely used
distance metric in NN-based classifiers, we have applied a variety of distance metrics in
MDD-DS. We call the "best distance metric” the metric which allows KNN, FKNN to classify
test samples with the highest accuracy, recall, precision, and F-score. The definition of the
distances considered in this paper (Spearman, Cosine, Correlation, Euclidean, Cityblock,
Chebychev, Hamming, Jaccard, and Seuclidean) are described in Table A1, included as an
Appendix A.
To determine the optimal value of k and distance for Nearest-Neighbors Models KNN
and FKNN, we deploy the pseudocode in Algorithm 2 to try different combinations in
two loops (odd k values initialized from [1 to 30] and the different distances used) over
the reduced dimension MDD-DS for 600 principal components. This value was selected
taking into account that, with 600 principal components, we obtain a value around 85% of
retained variance, as a criteria to choose the appropriate number of principle components.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 13 of 24

In addition, we have perceived that the results do not significantly improve if the number of
principal components increase. Since we pursue obtaining the optimal pair of k and distance
not only for classification per se (Top_1) but also for Top_2 and Top_3, the pseudocode
obtains the accuracy for all the combinations, as it is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Accuracy of KNN and FKNN for the three approaches: Top_1, Top_2 and Top_3.

The optimal type of the distance is Spearman of three approaches of KNN and FKNN.
Table 7 shows that the optimal value of k and accuracy result for each approach according
to Figure 3.

Table 7. Optimal parameters of KNN, FKNN for each approach.

KNN FKNN
k Accuracy k Accuracy
Top_1 1 0.8367 1 0.8446
Top_2 3 0.8874 13 0.9153
Top_3 7 0.9141 23 0.9413
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 14 of 24

Algorithm 2 Tuning parameter for KNN and FKNN

1: procedure T UNING _PARAMETERS(Train_PCA600, Test_PCA600)
2: Dist[] = [’Spearman’, ’Cosine’, ’Correlation’, ’Euclidean’, ’Cityblock’, ’Chebychev’, ’Ham-
ming’, ’Jaccard’, ’Seuclidean’]
3: Label C1 . First, Variety
4: Label C2 . Second Variety
5: Label C3 . Third Variety
6: i←1
7: for K ← 1 : 30 by 2 do
8: for J ← 1 : 9 do
9: M ← build_model(Train_PCA600, k, Dist[ J ])
10: [C1, C2, C3] ← Predict(M, Test_PCA600)
11: end for
12: i ← i+1
13: end for
14: Top_1 ← C1
15: Top_2 ← C1 & C2
16: Top_3 ← C1 & C2 & C3
17: return Top_1, Top_2, Top_3
18: end procedure

7. XGBoost Model
eXtreme Gradient Boosting (a.k.a XGBoost) [50,51] is an extremely scalable end-to-end
tree boosting system, a machine learning technique for classification and regression issues.
XGBoost is an additionally boosting algorithm belonging to supervised learning; it uses
an ensemble of X classification and regression trees (CARTs); each inside node represents
values for attributes test, and a leaf node with scores represents a choice (XEi |i ∈ 1 . . . X).
In terms of our problem in Figure 2, and given ~p = { p1 , p2 , . . . , pi , v̂}, XGBoost
can learn using Equation (6), which is ( p1 , p2 , . . . , pi ) → v̂. Given a set of features
~
{ p1 , p2 , . . . , pi } for unlabel_p, XGBoost can predict based on the total of the prediction
scores for every tree:
X
v̂i = ∑ s x ( p i ), s k ∈ S (6)
x =1

where pi represents the ith training sample of MDD-DS and vi is the variety corresponding
label, s x represents the score for xth tree, and S represents the set of all X scores for all
CARTs. XGBoost adopts a similar gradient boosting as the Gradient Boosting Machine
(GBM). Regularization is applied to enhance the ultimate result:

LF (θ ) = Σi l (v̂i , vi ) + Σ x Ω(s x ) (7)

where LF (θ ) means the total objective function, l represents the differentiable loss function
that measures the difference between the prediction of a variety v̂i and the target label of a
variety vi . The Ω avoids over-fitting, penalizing the complexity of the model:

1 T
Ω(s) = γT + λ ∑ w2j (8)
2 j =1

where γ and λ are constants that control the degree of regularization, T represents the
leaves number in the tree, and w means the weight of each leaf. XGBoost also applies a
second-order approximation to extend the loss function and removes the constant term and
applies two additional techniques to reduce overfitting further; the details can be found
in [50,51].
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 15 of 24

8. MLP Model
Multilayer perceptron’s (MLP) [52] is a deep feed-forward neural network particularly
designed for multi-class supervised learning problems. It has one or more hidden layers
between the input and the output; each layer fully connected to the next. An MLP network
is trained on a set of input–output pairs so that the network learns to model the depen-
dencies between those inputs and outputs. Training involves adjusting the parameters,
or weights and biases, of the model to minimize error. Back-propagation is used to make
those weight and bias adjustments in relation to error, and error itself can be measured in
various ways. Figure 4 shows MLP structure with scalar output.

Figure 4. MLP structure.

In terms of our problem in Figure 2, and given ~p = { p1 , p2 , . . . , pn , v}, MLP learns

~
a function f ({ p1 , p2 , . . . , pn }) → v. Given a set of features { p1 , p2 , . . . , pn } for unlabel_p,
MLP can learn a nonlinear function for classification in the varieties space v. For the
purpose of comparison, we built-up an MLP network from 600 principal components as a
reduced input set. With a Leaning Rate of 0.001, which is its default value (Learning rate is
a hyper-parameter that controls how much we are adjusting the weights of our network
with respect the loss gradient.), the first experiments showed a significative increase of
performance from 1 to 3 hidden layers and, above three hidden layers (3,4,5), the increase
in performance slows down while computation time increases significantly.
In practice, as the number of hidden layers determine the ability to generalize, we
selected three hidden layers; upper values, apart from increasing computation time, tend to
overfit, which leads to reduce classification performance for out-of-sample instances. To ob-
tain the optimal values of the number of nodes per layer N and the times an algorithm visits
the data set, training epoch T, we applied the pseudocode in Algorithm 3 over the reduced
dimension MDD-DS for 600 principal components (as mentioned, the reason in Section 6).
According to the curve in Figure 5, accuracy increases when the number of training epochs
significantly increase, and remarkably does not increase when applying 600, 700, and 800
and the same for the number of nodes. Therefore, the two loops can stop at 800; number of
nodes [300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800] and training epochs [100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800].
The result of the evaluation shows that the optimal number of nodes is 800 and the number
of training epochs is 600 for the three approaches ( Top_1, Top_2 and Top_3).

9. Evaluation and Results

For evaluation purposes, we have implemented the approaches using different tools
and programming languages: (i) R (Rstudio) to pre-process the data set and then (ii) Matlab
and Python to implement machine learning algorithms and deep neural networks. We
have analyzed the usual parameters of each algorithm: (i) k and the distance for KNN and
FKNN because these two parameters are the ones that condition the algorithm Section 6;
and (ii) the number of hidden layers, the number of nodes and the number of epochs
for MLP are the three most relevant parameters that condition the algorithm of neural
networks Section 8.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 16 of 24

Algorithm 3 Tuning parameter for MLP to the reduce MDD-DS with 600 principal compo-
nents and with a total of 159 classes (varieties)
1: procedure T UNING _PARAMETERS(Train_600, Test_600)
2: Learning_RateLR = 0.001; Hidden_layerHL = 3
3: Number_o f _Node N; Training_epochs T;
4: Label C1 . 1st Variety
5: Label C2 . 2nd Variety
6: Label C3 . 3rd Variety
7: for N ← 300 : 800 by 100 do
8: for T ← 100 : 800 by 100 do
9: Model M ← build_model_MLP(Train_600, Test_600, HL, LR )
10: [C1, C2, C3] ← Predict(M, Test_600)
11: T ← T+1
12: end for
13: N ← N+1
14: end for
15: Top_1 ← C1
16: Top_2 ← C1 & C2
17: Top_3 ← C1 & C2 & C3
18: return Top_1, Top_2, Top_3
19: end procedure

Figure 5. Accuracy of MLP for the three approaches: Top_1, Top_2, and Top_3.

In order to evaluate the different approaches, we randomly split the data from the
product matrix obtained from the dataset into a training set (' 90% of the data) and a testing
set (' 10% of the data). The evaluation performed on some of the measure parameters,
such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score [53] as shown in Equation (9). These
parameters are obtained from (i) True Positive (TP) (when the real value is positive and
prediction is positive); (ii) True Negative (TN) (when the real value is negative and the
prediction is negative); (iii) False Positive (FP) (when the real values is negative but the
prediction is positive); and (iv) False Negative (FN) (when the real value is positive but the
prediction is negative). Therefore, accuracy is described as the ratio of correctly classified
instances, which is the total number of correct predictions divided by the total number of
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 17 of 24

predictions made for a dataset; meanwhile, precision and recall are used to quantify how
well the proposed algorithm matches the ground truth. Precision quantifies the number
of positive class predictions that actually belong to the positive class. In addition, Recall
quantifies the number of positive class predictions made out of all positive examples in the
dataset. Finally, the F1-score provides a way to combine both precision and recall into a
single measure that captures both properties:

TP + TN
Accuracy =
TP + TN + FP + FN
TP
Precision =
TP + FP
(9)
TP
Recall =
TP + FN
Precision ∗ Recall
F1 − Score = 2 ∗
Precision + Recall
Table 8 and Figure 6 summarize the performance of our score-based approach, based
on the BM25 model.

Table 8. Score-based Methods: Quality measures.

Top_1 Top_2 Top_3

Accuracy 0.833 0.920 0.948
Precision 0.829 0.914 0.937
Recall 0.824 0.905 0.932
F1-score 0.818 0.905 0.931

Figure 6. Score-based Methods: Quality measures.

We evaluate the performance of our nearest neighbors models over a reduced dimen-
sion dataset with 400, 500, 600, 700, and 800 principal components. KNN results are shown
in Table 9. The results represent the best values for Top_1: 700 principal components with
Accuracy (0.8427). The best fit with Top_2 is 600 principal components with Accuracy
(0.8874). However, 500 principal components are also suitable for the F1-score (0.8241). In
addition to the Top_3, the exact result is 400 principal components with Accuracy (0.9201).
On the other hand, 700 principal components are also suitable for the F1-score (0.8263).
Regarding FKNN, Table 10 illustrates that the best fit with Top_1 for FKNN is 800 principal
components with accuracy (0.8459). In addition, the best fit with Top_2 is 600 principal
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 18 of 24

components with accuracy (0.9153), also suitable for the F1-score (0.8302). In addition to
the Top_3, the best result is 600 principal components with accuracy (0.9413) and F1-score
(0.8302). We would like to draw attention to the values of Top_1 results in Tables 9 and 10.
Both of them are the same, which indicates that recall equals precision and accuracy. This
means that the model is somehow “balanced”, that is, its ability to correctly classify positive
samples (TP+FN) is the same as its ability to correctly classify negative samples (TN+FP).
Therefore, the F1-score is also the same [53].

Table 9. KNN: Quality measures by number of PCA components.

PCA 400 500 600 700 800

Top_1
Accuracy 0.8339 0.8348 0.8367 0.8427 0.8332
Precision 0.8339 0.8348 0.8367 0.8427 0.8332
Recall 0.8339 0.8348 0.8367 0.8427 0.8332
F1-score 0.8339 0.8348 0.8367 0.8427 0.8332
Top_2
Accuracy 0.8862 0.8871 0.8874 0.8871 0.8865
Precision 0.8405 0.8441 0.8403 0.8408 0.8346
Recall 0.8019 0.805 0.8072 0.8072 0.8063
F1-score 0.8207 0.8241 0.8234 0.8237 0.8202
Top_3
Accuracy 0.9201 0.9125 0.9141 0.915 0.9137
Precision 0.8302 0.8313 0.8282 0.8048 0.8235
Recall 0.78 0.7793 0.7873 0.7844 0.7841
F1-score 0.8043 0.8045 0.8072 0.8263 0.8033

Table 10. FKNN: Quality measures by PCA components.

PCA 400 500 600 700 800

Top_1
Accuracy 0.8396 0.8424 0.8446 0.8443 0.8459
Precision 0.8396 0.8424 0.8446 0.8443 0.8459
Recall 0.8396 0.8424 0.8446 0.8443 0.8459
F1-score 0.8396 0.8424 0.8446 0.8443 0.8459
Top_2
Accuracy 0.8957 0.9141 0.9153 0.9061 0.9096
Precision 0.7908 0.8289 0.8317 0.8165 0.8216
Recall 0.7885 0.8266 0.8288 0.8126 0.8177
F1-score 0.7897 0.8278 0.8302 0.8146 0.8196
Top_3
Accuracy 0.9315 0.94 0.9413 0.9362 0.9362
Precision 0.7949 0.8291 0.8319 0.8129 0.8167
Recall 0.7803 0.8231 0.8285 0.8088 0.8123
F1-score 0.7875 0.8261 0.8302 0.8109 0.8145

Table 11 presents the performance of our XGBoost classifier, which was also obtained
for the principal components (400, 500, 600, 700, and 800), which declares selecting 400 as
the best value for the principal component for Top_1, Top_2 and Top_3; accuracy 0.7071 for
Top_1; 0.8126 for Top_2 and 0.8568 for Top_3.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 19 of 24

Table 11. XGBoost: Quality measures by PCA components.

PCA 400 500 600 700 800

Top_1
Accuracy 0.7071 0.6909 0.6928 0.6885 0.6923
Precision 0.5908 0.5651 0.5664 0.5395 0.5648
Recall 0.5722 0.5467 0.5471 0.5176 0.5411
F1-score 0.5814 0.5557 0.5577 0.5283 0.5526
Top_2
Accuracy 0.8126 0.8095 0.7949 0.7994 0.7946
Precision 0.6850 0.6756 0.6445 0.6179 0.6544
Recall 0.6619 0.6556 0.6348 0.6058 0.6424
F1-score 0.6733 0.6655 0.6396 0.6117 0.6483
Top_3
Accuracy 0.8568 0.8534 0.8404 0.8489 0.8389
Precision 0.7243 0.7059 0.6878 0.6391 0.6647
Recall 0.7114 0.6987 0.6723 0.6272 0.6597
F1-score 0.7178 0.7023 0.6799 0.6331 0.6622

The performance of our MLP classifier was obtained also for 400, 500, 600, 700, and
800 principal components, as it is shown in Table 12, which suggests selecting 800 as the
best value for the principal component for Top_1, Top_2, and Top_3; accuracy 0.8388 for
Top_1; 0.8436 for Top_2 and 0.8436 for Top_3.

Table 12. MLP: Quality measures by PCA components.

PCA 400 500 600 700 800

Top_1
Accuracy 0.8327 0.8218 0.8366 0.8346 0.8388
Precision 0.8332 0.8220 0.8362 0.8343 0.8391
Recall 0.8324 0.8218 0.8360 0.8340 0.8389
F1-score 0.8328 0.8219 0.8361 0.8342 0.8390
Top_2
Accuracy 0.8407 0.8324 0.8417 0.8404 0.8436
Precision 0.9688 0.9717 0.9814 0.9803 0.9815
Recall 0.8324 0.8218 0.8360 0.8340 0.8389
F1-score 0.8954 0.8905 0.9029 0.9013 0.9046
Top_3
Accuracy 0.8411 0.8327 0.8420 0.8407 0.8436
Precision 0.9908 0.9907 0.9988 0.9950 0.9965
Recall 0.8324 0.8218 0.8360 0.8340 0.8389
F1-score 0.9047 0.8983 0.9102 0.9074 0.9109

Additionally, we have assessed the results for the accuracy and the F1-score for the last
four algorithms with respect to Top_1, Top_2 and Top_3 on a reduced dimension dataset
with 400, 500, 600, 700, and 800 principal components, as shown in Figure 7. The FKNN
obtains the best accuracy on Top_1, Top_2, and Top_3. The highest accuracy, in Top_1, with
the appropriate PCA, is PCA-800 is (84.59%), and, in Top_2 and Top_3, with the suitable
PCA, it is PCA-600 is (91.53%, 94.13%), respectively. The best algorithm to obtain the
highest result in the F1-score is FKNN in Top_1 with the appropriate principal component
which is PCA-800 at the rate of 84.59%, while, in Top_2 and Top_3, the best algorithm is
MLP with PCA-800 at the rate of 90.46%, 91.09%, respectively.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 20 of 24

Figure 7. Accuracy & F1-score of KNN, FKNN, XGBoost, MLP.

To sum up, Figure 8 shows the comparison in terms of accuracy among all the models
(for their optimal values) regarding Top_1, Top_2 and Top_3. The best in Top_1 is FKNN
followed by KNN. In addition, the appropriate one in Top_2, Top_3 is BM25 followed
by FKNN.

Figure 8. Comparative study between all algorithms.

10. Conclusions
In this paper, we propose a solution for automatic classification of groceries in a digital
transformation scenario, where the availability of quality data are key for retailers and
costumers. In addition, the food market is a very dynamic context where new products
emerge daily, so product catalogs are composed of a huge amount of data that need constant
updates. Within this context, the Spanish company Midiadia provides retailers with quality
data about their product catalogs. Midiadia processes the information from the products
packaging and labeling to offer relevant knowledge to retailers that eventually support
commercial processes (offers, customization, etc.). Our main objective is to collaborate
with Midiadia to improve the efficiency of one of their internal processes: classification of
new products into the ontology the company uses. In particular, we focused on providing
an automatic classification mechanism that replaces the manual task of deciding to which
Variety (one of the taxonomy levels that is composed of 159 values) a new product belongs.
With this aim, we worked with three different alternatives in order to decide the
most appropriate: score-based algorithms, machine learning approaches, and deep neural
networks. After intensive work to preprocess the dataset (MDD-DS, composed by 20,888
products), we applied the following algorithms: first, we define a score-based algorithm
based on the probabilistic model BM25, but adapting the formulation to our specific
problem of groceries. Then, we applied the KNN, FKNN, and XGBoost algorithms, after
reducing the data dimensionality with PCA. Finally, we also applied an MLP algorithm
using the same PCA mechanism for reducing data dimensionality.
The main objective is providing a totally automatic classification tool that directly
offers one result: the most appropriate Variety for a new product (Top_1 option). However,
and considering the company benefits, we also studied other two alternatives: (i) Top_2
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 21 of 24

that obtains the two most appropriate Varieties for a new product and (ii) Top_3 that obtains
the three most appropriate Varieties for a new product. Both of them would also help
the classification process by turning the problem of classifying a new product within 159
categories into a problem of classifying a new product within two or three categories.
According to our results, the best in Top_1 is FKNN, closely followed by KNN. However,
in Top_2 and Top_3, the score-based algorithm performs better, closely followed by FKNN.
We are currently working on the creation of a dictionary of synonyms for ingredients.
This need arises because the current regulations allow manufacturers to include different
terms for the same element (vitamin C or ascorbic acid, for instance). Additionally, we
are working on extending our analysis to other approaches, such as Convolutional Neural
Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Deep Bidirectional LSTMs (BILSTM),
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and Support Vector
Machine (SVM). Regarding the course of dimensionality, applying DNN with abstract
features is a natural next step provided that the issues related with memory consumption
during training can be mitigated. After that, we expect to perform a comparison experiment
with deep neural networks using additional hidden layers. In addition, the research work
already done for the classification problem is the basis of a recommender algorithm to
provide product alternatives to the customer when the desired product is not available.
With this aim, we are currently working on a multidimensional recommender that takes
into account the list of ingredients and other relevant data, such as calories, allergens,
healthy aspects, etc.
Author Contributions: Conceptualization, M.M.H., A.F.V., R.P.D.R. and H.O.P.; methodology,
M.M.H., A.F.V., R.P.D.R. and H.O.P.; software, M.M.H. and H.O.P.; validation, M.M.H. and H.O.P.;
formal analysis, M.M.H., A.F.V., R.P.D.R. and H.O.P.; investigation, M.M.H., A.F.V., R.P.D.R. and
H.O.P.; resources, A.F.V. and R.P.D.R.; data curation, M.M.H.; writing—original draft preparation,
M.M.H., A.F.V. and R.P.D.R.; writing—review and editing, M.M.H., A.F.V. and R.P.D.R.; supervision,
A.F.V. and R.P.D.R.; funding acquisition, A.F.V. and R.P.D.R. All authors have read and agreed to the
published version of the manuscript.
Funding: This work has received financial support from the European Regional Development Fund
(ERDF) and the Galician Regional Government, under the agreement for funding the Atlantic Research
Center for Information and Communication Technologies (atlanTTIC), and the Spanish Ministry of
Economy and Competitiveness, under the National Science Program (TEC2017-84197-C4-2-R).
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)
and the Galician Regional 7 Government, under the agreement for funding the Atlantic Research Center
for Information and Communication Technologies (atlanTTIC), and the Spanish Ministry of Economy
and Competitiveness, under the National Science Program (TEC2017-84197-C4-2-R).
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4117 22 of 24

Appendix A. Extra Tables

Table A1. Definition of distance measures [31,54].

Cityblock, also known as Manhattan distance, It examines the Cosine is a measure of similarity between two nonzero vectors
absolute differences between the opposite values in vectors as of an internal product space that measures the cosine of the
shown in Equation (A1). angle between them as shown in Equation (A2).
n a·b
CB[ a, b] = ∑ | a i − bi | (A1) cos( a, b) =
|| a|| · ||b||
(A2)
i =1

Correlation is a measure of dependency between two paired

random vectors of arbitrary dimension, not necessarily equal as Euclidean is the ordinary straight-line distance between two
shown in Equation (A3). points in Euclidean space as shown in Equation (A4).
s
n
∑in=1 ( ai − a)(bi − b)
CorD [ a, b] = q (A3) ED [ a, b] = ∑ | a i − bi | 2 (A4)
∑in=1 ( ai − a)2 (bi − b)2 i =1

Seuclidean, Standardized Euclidean distance. Defined as the Jaccard distance measures the difference between sets of
Euclidean distance calculated on standardized data as shown samples, it is a complement to the Jaccard similarity coefficient
in Equation (A5). and is obtained by subtracting the Jaccard coefficient from one
as shown in Equation (A6):
s
n
1
SED [ a, b] = ∑ 2 ( ai − bi )2 (A5) Jac[ a, b] =
∑i min( ai , bi )
(A6)
i =1 k i ∑i max( ai , bi )

Hamming, the percentage of coordinates that differ as shown Chebychev, Maximum coordinate difference as shown
in Equation (A7). in Equation (A8).
n
CD [ a, b] = max | ai − bi |
HD ( a, b) = ∑ 1a 6=b
i i
(A7) i
(A8)
i =1

Spearman’s ρ is a nonparametric measure of the statistical

dependence of rank correlation between the rankings of two 6 ∑ d2i
ρ = 1− (A9)
variables. Evaluate how well the relationship between two n ( n2 − 1)
variables can be described using a monotonic function as shown where d = the pairwise distances of the ranks of the variables
in Equation (A9). ai and bi . n = the number of samples.

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