A Computational Model for Predicting Customer Behaviors Using Transformer Adapted with Tabular Features

Abstract

AbstractThe recent decade has seen an explosion in the e-commerce industry with the support of modern technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence) to maximize conversion rates. Many recommendation systems, therefore, have been developed to predict the customer behaviors to take appropriate actions. Customization of promotions or items for distinct groups of online customers considerably contributes to enhancing the sales. The purchasing records are essential information that can be used to investigate the customer behaviors. These kinds of information, however, are mainly expressed in tubular forms. Several computational models were developed using conventional machine learning algorithms to deal with that data type. However, these approaches struggle with large-volume and high-dimensional data, feature engineering, and high computational cost. In our study, we propose a deep learning model based on the Feature Tokenizer Transformer architecture to predict the customer purchasing intention. This novel architecture is a simplified adaptive version of the Transformer tabular data. The results demonstrated that our model showed better performance compared to conventional machine learning models. Furthermore, the model’s stability was also confirmed by the results of multiple repeated experiments.