Learning and Transferring IDs Representation in E-commerce

Many machine intelligence techniques are developed in E-commerce and one of the most essential components is the representation of IDs, including user ID, item ID, product ID, store ID, brand ID, category ID etc. The classical encoding based methods (like one-hot encoding) are inefficient in that it suffers sparsity problems due to its high dimension, and it cannot reflect the relationships among IDs, either homogeneous or heterogeneous ones. In this paper, we propose an embedding based framework to learn and transfer the representation of IDs. As the implicit feedbacks of users, a tremendous amount of item ID sequences can be easily collected from the interactive sessions. By jointly using these informative sequences and the structural connections among IDs, all types of IDs can be embedded into one low-dimensional semantic space. Subsequently, the learned representations are utilized and transferred in four scenarios: (i) measuring the similarity between items, (ii) transferring from seen items to unseen items, (iii) transferring across different domains, (iv) transferring across different tasks. We deploy and evaluate the proposed approach in Hema App and the results validate its effectiveness.Comment: KDD'18, 9 page

Customer purchase behavior prediction in E-commerce: a conceptual framework and research agenda

Digital retailers are experiencing an increasing number of transactions coming from their consumers online, a consequence of the convenience in buying goods via E-commerce platforms. Such interactions compose complex behavioral patterns which can be analyzed through predictive analytics to enable businesses to understand consumer needs. In this abundance of big data and possible tools to analyze them, a systematic review of the literature is missing. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic literature review of recent research dealing with customer purchase prediction in the E-commerce context. The main contributions are a novel analytical framework and a research agenda in the field. The framework reveals three main tasks in this review, namely, the prediction of customer intents, buying sessions, and purchase decisions. Those are followed by their employed predictive methodologies and are analyzed from three perspectives. Finally, the research agenda provides major existing issues for further research in the field of purchase behavior prediction online

Research on the Construction of Sales Forecasting Model of Fashion Products Based on Feature Representation of Multimodal and Deep Learning

By improving the accuracy of sales forecasting, this paper provides support for fashion product sales enterprises to make better inventory management and operational decisions. The deep neural network is introduced into the construction of multimodal features, and the internal structure of different modes, such as historical sales features, picture features, and basic attribute features of products, are fully considered, and finally the sales forecasting model of fashion products based on multimodal feature fusion is constructed. In addition, combined with the actual data of the enterprise, the proposed model is compared with the exponential regression model and shallow neural network model. The paper finds that multimodal features and deep learning representation method has better performance than traditional methods (exponential regression and shallow neural network) in the task of predicting sales of fashion products. The results help enterprises use the deep learning method and the data of multiple modal to make accurate sales forecast

Sales forecasting of stores in shopping malls: A study based on external data and transaction data

To improve the forecast accuracy of the sales of stores in shopping malls, this paper proposes a prediction method based on deep learning that comprehensively considers the external data, such as online review data of shopping mall stores, weather data, weekday/weekend data, and historical transaction data of the stores. To begin with, the online review data of the stores are pre-trained with BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to complete the multi-label sentiment classification and obtain the intensity index of perceived sentiment of reviews. The index, together with other external data, such as online ratings, weather, weekday/weekend differences, and historical transactions of the stores, is pre-processed. At last, the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and the Attention models are used to predict the sales volume of stores in a certain shopping mall. The results show that the addition of external data – weather, weekday/weekend, online ratings and intensity index of sentiment of reviews – to the historical sales data-based model can effectively improve the forecast accuracy of store sales

Inventory Optimization Model Design with Machine Learning Approach in Feed Mill Company

This article aims to address the impacts that companies can have with the application of machine learning to carry out their demand forecasts, knowing that a more accurate demand forecast improves the performance of companies, making them more competitive. The methodology used was a literature review through descriptive, qualitative and with bibliographical surveys in International Journal from 2010 – 2022 by different authors. Findings show that the references prove that demand forecasting with the use of machine learning brings many benefits to organizations, for example, since the results are more accurate, there is better inventory management, consequently customer satisfaction for having the product at the right time and place. Further, this article concludes and suggests that the use of machine learning is able to identify variables that affect the demands, with this it makes a forecast closer to reality and helps managers to make more accurate decisions, improving strategic planning and supply chain management. of company supplies

Scalable Probabilistic Forecasting in Retail with Gradient Boosted Trees: A Practitioner's Approach

The recent M5 competition has advanced the state-of-the-art in retail forecasting. However, we notice important differences between the competition challenge and the challenges we face in a large e-commerce company. The datasets in our scenario are larger (hundreds of thousands of time series), and e-commerce can afford to have a larger assortment than brick-and-mortar retailers, leading to more intermittent data. To scale to larger dataset sizes with feasible computational effort, firstly, we investigate a two-layer hierarchy and propose a top-down approach to forecasting at an aggregated level with less amount of series and intermittency, and then disaggregating to obtain the decision-level forecasts. Probabilistic forecasts are generated under distributional assumptions. Secondly, direct training at the lower level with subsamples can also be an alternative way of scaling. Performance of modelling with subsets is evaluated with the main dataset. Apart from a proprietary dataset, the proposed scalable methods are evaluated using the Favorita dataset and the M5 dataset. We are able to show the differences in characteristics of the e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail datasets. Notably, our top-down forecasting framework enters the top 50 of the original M5 competition, even with models trained at a higher level under a much simpler setting