E-commerce web applications are almost ubiquitous in our day to day life, however as useful as they are, most of them have little to no adaptation to user needs, which in turn can cause both lower conversion rates as well as unsatisfied customers. We propose a machine learning system which learns the user behaviour from multiple previous sessions and predicts useful metrics for the current session. In turn, these metrics can be used by the applications to customize and better target the customer, which can mean anything from offering better offers of specific products, targeted notifications or placing smart ads. The data used for the learning algorithm is extracted from Google Analytics Enhanced E-commerce, which is enabled by most e-commerce websites and thus the system can be used by any such merchant. In order to learn the user patterns, only its behaviour features were used, which don't include names, gender or any other personal information that could identify the user. The learning model that was used is a double recurrent neural network which learns both intra-session and inter-session features. The model predicts for each session a probability score for each of the defined target classes.
For Recommender Systems, classical approaches use either collaborative filtering or content-based filtering using supervised learning. Matrix factorization @cite_8 is a prime example of collaborative filtering, however the main problem is that it can suffer from cold-start issue with new users. This is partially solved using recurrent neural networks on the data alone, such as in @cite_6 .
@cite_6 @cite_8
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Although content is fundamental to our music listening preferences, the leading performance in music recommendation is achieved by collaborative-filtering-based methods which exploit the similarity patterns in user’s listening history rather than the audio content of songs. Meanwhile, collaborative filtering has the well-known “cold-start” problem, i.e., it is unable to work with new songs that no one has listened to. Efforts on incorporating content information into collaborative filtering methods have shown success in many non-musical applications, such as scientific article recommendation. Inspired by the related work, we train a neural network on semantic tagging information as a content model and use it as a prior in a collaborative filtering model. Such a system still allows the user listening data to “speak for itself”. The proposed system is evaluated on the Million Song Dataset and shows comparably better result than the collaborative filtering approaches, in addition to the favorable performance in the cold-start case. In a variety of application domains the content to be recommended to users is associated with text. This includes research papers, movies with associated plot summaries, news articles, blog posts, etc. Recommendation approaches based on latent factor models can be extended naturally to leverage text by employing an explicit mapping from text to factors. This enables recommendations for new, unseen content, and may generalize better, since the factors for all items are produced by a compactly-parametrized model. Previous work has used topic models or averages of word embeddings for this mapping. In this paper we present a method leveraging deep recurrent neural networks to encode the text sequence into a latent vector, specifically gated recurrent units (GRUs) trained end-to-end on the collaborative filtering task. For the task of scientific paper recommendation, this yields models with significantly higher accuracy. In cold-start scenarios, we beat the previous state-of-the-art, all of which ignore word order. Performance is further improved by multi-task learning, where the text encoder network is trained for a combination of content recommendation and item metadata prediction. This regularizes the collaborative filtering model, ameliorating the problem of sparsity of the observed rating matrix. Content-based recommendation systems can provide recommendations for "cold-start" items for which little or no training data is available, but typically have lower accuracy than collaborative filtering systems. Conversely, collaborative filtering techniques often provide accurate recommendations, but fail on cold start items. Hybrid schemes attempt to combine these different kinds of information to yield better recommendations across the board. We describe unified Boltzmann machines, which are probabilistic models that combine collaborative and content information in a coherent manner. They encode collaborative and content information as features, and then learn weights that reflect how well each feature predicts user actions. In doing so, information of different types is automatically weighted, without the need for careful engineering of features or for post-hoc hybridization of distinct recommender systems. We present empirical results in the movie and shopping domains showing that unified Boltzmann machines can be used to combine content and collaborative information to yield results that are competitive with collaborative techniques in recommending items that have been seen before, and also effective at recommending cold-start items. Matrix factorization (MF) collaborative filtering is an effective and widely used method in recommendation systems. However, the problem of finding an optimal trade-off between exploration and exploitation (otherwise known as the bandit problem), a crucial problem in collaborative filtering from cold-start, has not been previously addressed. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm for online MF recommendation that automatically combines finding the most relevant items with exploring new or less-recommended items. Our approach, called Particle Thompson sampling for MF (PTS), is based on the general Thompson sampling framework, but augmented with a novel efficient online Bayesian probabilistic matrix factorization method based on the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter. Extensive experiments in collaborative filtering using several real-world datasets demonstrate that PTS significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-arts.