about
E-Commerce Customer Lifetime Value Prediction Using Embeddings (arxiv.org)
2 points by eicnix on Feb 15, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of hand-building hundreds of customer features, the system learns a compact summary of each shopper straight from their purchase history, with a trick that keeps working as the product range changes. It predicted future customer value significantly better than the handcrafted-feature approach.

Abstract · Customer Lifetime Value Prediction Using Embeddings

We describe the Customer LifeTime Value (CLTV) prediction system deployed at ASOS.com, a global online fashion retailer. CLTV prediction is an important problem in e-commerce where an accurate estimate of future value allows retailers to effectively allocate marketing spend, identify and nurture high value customers and mitigate exposure to losses. The system at ASOS provides daily estimates of the future value of every customer and is one of the cornerstones of the personalised shopping experience. The state of the art in this domain uses large numbers of handcrafted features and ensemble regressors to forecast value, predict churn and evaluate customer loyalty. Recently, domains including language, vision and speech have shown dramatic advances by replacing handcrafted features with features that are learned automatically from data. We detail the system deployed at ASOS and show that learning feature representations is a promising extension to the state of the art in CLTV modelling. We propose a novel way to generate embeddings of customers, which addresses the issue of the ever changing product catalogue and obtain a significant improvement over an exhaustive set of handcrafted features.

Benjamin Paul Chamberlain, Angelo Cardoso, C. H. Bryan Liu, Roberto Pagliari, Marc Peter Deisenroth
arXiv:1703.02596 · cs.LG, cs.CY, cs.IR, cs.NE, stat.ML · submitted Mar 7, 2017 · updated Jul 6, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · 10 pages, 11 figures

add comment on HN