Predicting Shopping Behavior with Mixture of RNNs

We compare two machine learning approaches for early prediction of shoppers’ behaviors, leveraging features from clickstream data generated during live shopping sessions. Our baseline is a mixture of Markov models to predict three outcomes: purchase, abandoned shopping cart, and browsing-only. We then experiment with a mixture of Recurrent Neural Networks. When sequences are truncated to 75% of their length, a relatively small feature set predicts purchase with an F-measure of 0.80 and browsing-only with an F-measure of 0.98. We also investigate an entropy-based decision procedure.

[1]  Lukás Burget,et al.  Recurrent neural network based language model , 2010, INTERSPEECH.

[2]  Dimitris J. Bertsimas,et al.  Dynamic Classification of Online Customers , 2003, SDM.

[3]  Wojciech Zaremba,et al.  Recurrent Neural Network Regularization , 2014, ArXiv.

[4]  Joshua Goodman,et al.  A bit of progress in language modeling , 2001, Comput. Speech Lang..

[5]  Monika Kukar-Kinney,et al.  The determinants of consumers’ online shopping cart abandonment , 2010 .

[6]  Yoshua Bengio,et al.  A Neural Probabilistic Language Model , 2003, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[7]  Armando Vieira,et al.  Predicting online user behaviour using deep learning algorithms , 2015, ArXiv.

[8]  Martín Abadi,et al.  TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems , 2016, ArXiv.

[9]  Robert Florentin Muster.  Online shopping abandonment rate a new perspective : the role of choice conflicts as a factor of online shopping abandonment , 2016 .

[10]  Yin Xu,et al.  Factors influencing cart abandonment in the online shopping process , 2015 .

[11]  James R. Glass,et al.  Iterative language model estimation: efficient data structure & algorithms , 2008, INTERSPEECH.

[12]  Deepak Pai,et al.  Modelling Visit Similarity Using Click-Stream Data: A Supervised Approach , 2014, WISE.

[13]  Rubing Duan,et al.  Neural Modeling of Buying Behaviour for E-Commerce from Clicking Patterns , 2015, RecSys Challenge.

[14]  Jian Pei,et al.  A brief survey on sequence classification , 2010, SKDD.