Boosting Product Categorization with Machine Learning

Product categories are the structural backbone of every online shop, but it can be quite a nightmare for e-commerce managers to make sure that all products are assigned to the correct categories. The set of available categories is typically large (Amazon has listed over 50000), changes constantly, and new products have to be added on a daily basis. Mistakes can be costly, because miscategorized products not only look confusing and unprofessional, they also cannot be sold when customers are not able to find them. To improve the process of product categorization, we looked into methods from machine learning. Our goal was to develop a machine learning system that can predict which categories fit best to a given product, in order to make the whole process easier, faster and less error-prone. In this blog post, I am going to walk you through the problems we faced on the way and how we decided to solve them.