Generic Framework to Predict Repeat Behavior of Customers Using Their Transaction History

Abstract

There exists a class of problems in e-commerce and retail businesses where the shopping behavior of customers is analyzed in order to predict their repeat behavior for products or retail stores. This analysis plays a crucial role in advertisement budgeting, product placement and relevant customer targeting. Researchers have addressed this problem by using standard predictive models, which use ad hoc features. We propose a metamodel that abstracts the different dimensions of data present in transactional datasets. These dimensions can be customer, product, offer, target, marketplace and transactions. Our framework also has abstract functions for comprehensive feature set generation, and includes different machine learning algorithms to learn prediction model. Our framework works end-to-end from feature engineering to reporting repeat probabilities of customers for products (or marketplace, brand, website or storechain). Moreover, the predicted repeat behavior of customers for different products along with their transactional history is used by our offer optimization model i-Prescribe to suggest products to be offered to customers with the goal of maximizing the return on investment of given marketing budget. We prove that our abstract features work on two different data-challenge datasets, by sharing experimental results.