Personalized Category Frequency prediction for Buy It Again recommendations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical personalized category and item prediction model for Buy It Again recommendations, improving ranking accuracy and engagement by capturing consumption trends and preferences.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hierarchical PCIC model combining survival and time series analysis with neural networks for personalized category and item recommendations.

Findings

PCIC improves NDCG by up to 16% over baselines.

Achieved scalable training on 100 million guests and 3 million items.

Deployed in a major retailer's site, increasing guest engagement.

Abstract

Buy It Again (BIA) recommendations are crucial to retailers to help improve user experience and site engagement by suggesting items that customers are likely to buy again based on their own repeat purchasing patterns. Most existing BIA studies analyze guests personalized behavior at item granularity. A category-based model may be more appropriate in such scenarios. We propose a recommendation system called a hierarchical PCIC model that consists of a personalized category model (PC model) and a personalized item model within categories (IC model). PC model generates a personalized list of categories that customers are likely to purchase again. IC model ranks items within categories that guests are likely to consume within a category. The hierarchical PCIC model captures the general consumption rate of products using survival models. Trends in consumption are captured using time series models. Features derived from these models are used in training a category-grained neural network. We compare PCIC to twelve existing baselines on four standard open datasets. PCIC improves NDCG up to 16 percent while improving recall by around 2 percent. We were able to scale and train (over 8 hours) PCIC on a large dataset of 100M guests and 3M items where repeat categories of a guest out number repeat items. PCIC was deployed and AB tested on the site of a major retailer, leading to significant gains in guest engagement.