Predicting E-commerce Purchase Behavior using a DQN-Inspired Deep Learning Model for enhanced adaptability

Jain, Aditi Madhusudan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

--This paper presents a novel approach to predicting buying intent and product demand in e-commerce settings, leveraging a Deep Q-Network (DQN) inspired architecture. In the rapidly evolving landscape of online retail, accurate prediction of user behavior is crucial for optimizing inventory management, personalizing user experiences, and maximizing sales. We evaluate our model on a large-scale e-commerce dataset comprising over 885,000 user sessions, each characterized by 1,114 features. Our approach demonstrates robust performance in handling the inherent class imbalance typical in e-commerce data, where purchase events are significantly less frequent than non-purchase events. Through comprehensive experimentation with various classification thresholds, we show that our model achieves a balance between precision and recall, with an overall accuracy of 88% and an AUC-ROC score of 0.88. Comparative analysis reveals that our DQN-inspired model offers advantages over traditional machine learning and standard deep learning approaches, particularly in its ability to capture complex temporal patterns in user behavior . This research contributes to the field of e-commerce analytics by introducing a novel predictive modeling technique that combines the strengths of deep learning and reinforcement learning paradigms. Our findings have significant implications for improving demand forecasting, personalizing user experiences, and optimizing marketing strategies in online retail environments. The e-commerce industry has experienced unprecedented growth in recent years, with global sales projected to reach $6.3 trillion by 2024 [1].