Timing-Aware Repurchase Prediction for Web-Scale E-Commerce: Survival Models for Multi-Surface Grocery Recommendation

Abstract

Repurchase recommenders in e-commerce are commonly framed as a binary question asking "will this customer buy this item within W days", a formulation that requires a separately trained model for every horizon of interest. We replace this stack with survival models that predict time-to-repurchase directly, and evaluate them on millions of customers from a major grocery e-commerce platform across more than thirty ablation configurations. Our study makes three contributions. First, an empirical hazard analysis reveals a slightly decreasing marginal hazard (k ~ 0.9), differing from the common intuition that grocery items become more likely to be repurchased the longer since the last purchase (increasing hazard, k > 1). Log-Normal achieves the best marginal fit (R^2 = 0.998) and the best ranking, despite Weibull providing the best conditional residual fit, revealing an apparent discrepancy we analyze in detail. Second, a single Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model replaces three per-horizon binary classifiers, matching or exceeding each at its own horizon while using roughly 3x fewer total trees. Feature importance reshuffles under the survival objective: channel-cadence and recency signals rise while aggregate frequency counts fall. Third, a 4-parameter parametric calibration maps raw survival CDFs to per-horizon probabilities with zero cross-horizon monotonicity violations. Calibration quality varies by an order of magnitude across the AFT family: Exponential AFT (Weibull k=1) achieves expected calibration error (ECE) ~1e-4, roughly 10x lower than Log-Normal, while ranking metrics agree within 0.3% relative. We adopt Exponential AFT for probability-consuming surfaces and Log-Normal for pure ranking, exposing a principled calibration-ranking trade-off within a single AFT family.