A Novel Multidimensional Scaling Technique for Mapping Word-Of-Mouth Discussions

The techniques which utilize Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) as a fundamental statistical tool have been well developed since the late 1970’s. In this paper we show how anMDS scheme can be enhanced by incorporating into it a Stochastic Point Location (SPL) strategy (one which optimizes the former’s gradient descent learning phase) and a new Stress function. The enhanced method, referred to as MDS SPL, has been used in conjunction with a combination of the TF-IDF and Cosine Similarities on a very noisy Word-Of-Mouth (WoM) discussion set consisting of postings concerning mobile phones, yielding extremely satisfying results.