A gradient boosting classifier for purchase intention prediction of online shoppers

Early purchase prediction plays a vital role for an e-commerce website. It enables e-shoppers to enlist consumers for product suggestions, offer discount and for many other interventions. Several work has already been done using session log for analyzing customer behavior whether he performs a purchase on the product or not. In most cases, it is difficult to find out and make a list of customers and offer them discount when their session ends. In this paper, we propose a customer's purchase intention prediction model where e-shoppers can detect customer's purpose earlier. First, we apply feature selection technique to select best features. Then the extracted features are fed to train supervised learning models. Several classifiers like support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), multilayer perceptron (MLP), decision tree (DT), and XGBoost classifiers have been applied along with oversampling method for balancing the dataset. The experiments were performed on a standard benchmark dataset. Experimental results show that XGBoost classifier with feature selection techniques and oversampling method has the significantly higher area under ROC curve (auROC) score and are under precision-recall curve (auPR) score which are 0.937 and 0.754 respectively. On the other hand accuracy achieved by XGBoost and Decision tree are significantly improved and they are 90.65% and 90.54% respectively. Overall performance of the gradient boosting method is significantly improved compared to other classifiers and state-of-the-art methods. In addition to this, a method for explainable analysis on the problem was outlined.