A New 360° Framework to Predict Customer Lifetime Value for Multi-Category E-Commerce Companies Using a Multi-Output Deep Neural Network and Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Online purchasing has developed rapidly in recent years due to its efficiency, convenience, low cost, and product variety. This has increased the number of online multi-category e-commerce retailers that sell a variety of product categories. Due to the growth in the number of players, each company needs to optimize its own business strategy in order to compete. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a common metric that multi-category e-commerce retailers usually consider for competition because it helps determine the most valuable customers for the retailers. However, in this paper, we introduce two additional novel factors in addition to CLV to determine which customers will bring in the highest revenue in the future: distinct product category (DPC) and trend in amount spent (TAS). Then, we propose a new framework. We utilized, for the first time in the relevant literature, a multi-output deep neural network (DNN) model to test our proposed framework while forecasting CLV, DPC, and TAS together. To make this outcome applicable in real life, we constructed customer clusters that allow the management of multi-category e-commerce companies to segment end-users based on the three variables. We compared the proposed framework (constructed with multiple outputs: CLV, DPC, and TAS) against a baseline single-output model to determine the combined effect of the multi-output model. In addition, we also compared the proposed model with multi-output Decision Tree (DT) and multi-output Random Forest (RF) algorithms on the same dataset. The results indicate that the multi-output DNN model outperforms the single-output DNN model, multi-output DT, and multi-output RF across all assessment measures, proving that the multi-output DNN model is more suitable for multi-category e-commerce retailers’ usage. Furthermore, Shapley values derived through the explainable artificial intelligence method are used to interpret the decisions of the DNN. This practice demonstrates which inputs contribute more to the outcomes (a significant novelty in interpreting the DNN model for the CLV).