2021/08/17 by Priya Gupta, Gupta, Priya, Cuize Han +1
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Customer churn and segmentation #Digital Marketing and Social Media #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Technology Adoption and User Behaviour
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2108.07872
openalex publication_date 2021/08/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
E-commerce websites use machine learned ranking models to serve shopping results to customers. Typically, the websites log the customer search events, which include the query entered and the resulting engagement with the shopping results, such as clicks and purchases. Each customer search event serves as input training data for the models, and the individual customer engagement serves as a signal for customer preference. So a purchased shopping result, for example, is perceived to be more important than one that is not. However, new or under-impressed products do not have enough customer engagement signals and end up at a disadvantage when being ranked alongside popular products. In this paper, we propose a novel method for data curation that aggregates all customer engagements within a day for the same query to use as input training data. This aggregated customer engagement gives the models a complete picture of the relative importance of shopping results. Training models on this aggregated data leads to less reliance on behavioral features. This helps mitigate the cold start problem and boosted relevant new products to top search results. In this paper, we present the offline and online analysis and results comparing the individual and aggregated customer engagement models trained on e-commerce data.