Online purchase prediction via multi-scale modeling of behavior dynamics

Abstract

Online purchase forecasting is of great importance in e-commerce platforms, which is the basis of how to present personalized interesting product lists to individual customers. However, predicting online purchases is not trivial as it is influenced by many factors including: (i) the complex temporal pattern with hierarchical inter-correlations; (ii) arbitrary category dependencies. To address these factors, we develop a Graph Multi-Scale Pyramid Networks (GMP) framework to fully exploit users' latent behavioral patterns with both multi-scale temporal dynamics and arbitrary inter-dependencies among product categories. In GMP, we first design a multi-scale pyramid modulation network architecture which seamlessly preserves the underlying hierarchical temporal factors-governing users' purchase behaviors. Then, we employ convolution recurrent neural network to encode the categorical temporal pattern at each scale. After that, we develop a resolution-wise recalibration gating mechanism to automatically re-weight the importance of each scale-view representations. Finally, a context-graph neural network module is proposed to adaptively uncover complex dependencies among category-specific purchases. Extensive experiments on real-world e-commerce datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method over state-of-the-art baselines across various settings.