Purchasing Behavior Analysis Model that Considers the Relationship Between Topic Hierarchy and Item Categories

Abstract

AbstractWith the spread of EC sites, it has become an important work for companies to analyze user preferences contained in accumulated purchase history data and utilize them in marketing measures. A topic model is well known as a method for analyzing user preferences from purchase history data, and a model assuming hierarchy of topics has been proposed as an extension method. The previously proposed PAM (Pachinko Allocation Model) is a highly expressive model in which all upper and lower topics are connected by a network and the relationships between multiple topics can be analyzed. However, PAM is easily affected by the initial values of learning parameters, and it is difficult to obtain stable topics, so the interpretation of the estimated topics becomes unstable. It is dangerous to make business decisions based on the interpretation of such unstable results. Therefore, in this research, instead of using the hierarchy of topics estimated based on the user’s purchasing behavior, we use information with a hierarchical structure of “product categories” given by the EC site for managing items. Therefore, we propose a method that is useful for studying measures and that enables hierarchical topic analysis. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the evaluation history data of the actual EC site to analyze the user’s preference and show its usefulness.KeywordsTopic modelPurchase history dataEC site