Enhancing E-Commerce Recommendation Systems with Multiple Item Purchase Data: A Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers-Based Approach

Abstract

This study proposes how to incorporate concurrent purchase data into e-commerce recommendation systems to improve their predictive accuracy. We identified that concurrent purchases account for about 23% of total orders on Katcher’s, a Korean e-commerce platform. Despite the prevalence of concurrent purchases, existing algorithms often overlook this aspect. We introduce a novel transformer-based recommendation algorithm to process a user’s order history, including concurrent purchases. Each order is represented as a natural language sentence, capturing the order timestamp, product names and their attribute values, their corresponding categories, and whether multiple products were purchased together in a single order (i.e., a concurrent purchase). These sentences form a sequence, which serves as a training dataset for fine-tuning Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) with the Next Sentence Prediction objective. We validate our ideas by conducting experiments on Katcher’s platform, demonstrating the proposed method’s improved prediction performance compared to existing recommendation systems, with enhanced accuracy and F1 score. Notably, the normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG) showed a significant improvement with a large margin. Furthermore, we demonstrate the beneficial impact of integrating concurrent purchase information on prediction performance.