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

Abstract

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. Our method adapts concepts from reinforcement learning to a supervised learning context, combining the sequential modeling capabilities of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with the strategic decision-making aspects of DQNs. 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. The model's performance and scalability make it well-suited for real-world e-commerce applications dealing with high-dimensional, sequential data. 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.