Modeling User Purchase Preference Based on Implicit Feedback

In this paper we propose a new user purchase preference model based on their implicit feedback behavior. We analyze user behavior data to seek their purchase preference signals. We find that if a user has more purchase preference on a certain item he would tend to browse it for more times. It gives us an important inspiration that, not only purchasing behavior but also other types of implicit feedback like browsing behavior, can indicate user purchase preference. We further find that user purchase preference signals also exist in the browsing behavior of item categories. Therefore, when we want to predict user purchase preference for certain items, we can integrate these behavior types into our user preference model by converting such preference signals into numerical values. We evaluate our model on a real-world dataset from a shopping site in China. Results further validate that user purchase preference model in our paper can capture more and accurate user purchase preference information from implicit feedback and greatly improves the performance of user purchase prediction.