Abstract: Given a new product (a tuple), the research in this paper considers the problem of selecting a small subset of attributes to highlight such that the product stands out in a crowd of existing competitive products and is widely visible to the pool of potential customers. This problem has applications in marketing and product manufacturing and has been the subject of recent investigations. This research considers an important variant where a product is considered to be visible to a customer if it occurs in the skyline of the query posed by the customer. Given a set of d-dimensional points, a skyline query returns points that are not dominated by any other point on all dimensions. This problem variant poses new challenges that cannot be solved optimally using prior techniques. In this work, we develop a novel optimal algorithm based on the Signature Tree data structure as well as approximation algorithms to solve the problem. We conduct a performance study illustrating the benefits of our methods on real as well as synthetic data.

Keywords: maximize visibility, subset of attributes, skylines, signature tree, algorithms

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Recommended Citation: Miah, M. (2012). Maximizing Visibility in Skylines. Journal of Information Systems Applied Research, 5(1) pp 36-50. http://jisar.org/2012-5/ ISSN: 1946-1836. (A preliminary version appears in The Proceedings of CONISAR 2011)