Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 34 (2019) 100836

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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/elerap

Will this session end with a purchase? Inferring current purchase intent of T
anonymous visitors
⁎
Osnat Mokryna, , Veronika Boginab, Tsvi Kuflikb
a
Department of Information and Knowledge Management, University of Haifa, Israel
b
Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa, Israel

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Understanding the online behavior and intent of online visitors is the subject of a long line of research. me-
Purchase intent chanisms to understand the purchase intent of visitors, to increase the number of visits that end with a purchase.
Anonymous visitors anonymous visitors garner little attention, having no shopping history or known interests. Compared to profiled
Session dynamics returning customers whose history is known, anonymous visitors garner less attention. The lack of a known
Products trendiness
shopping history or interests makes it hard to learn from their behavior, or infer their shopping intent. Here, we
Temporal session information
suggest the use of products’ popularity trends and visit’s temporal information to infer the purchase intention of
anonymous visitors. We model these dynamics and utilize our model to infer purchase intent of visitors of two
large real e-commerce retailer sites. Our model identifies online signals for purchase intent that can be used for
online purchase prediction.

1. Introduction for applying marketing strategies, recommender systems and personal

E-commerce has become a prevalent method for shopping, with
over 79% of Americans visiting e-commerce sites, as reported by Pew
Research Center, 2016. Yet, only a tiny fraction of these visits end with
a purchase, in the range of 2 to 5 percent (Pew Research Center, 2016;
Center for Retail Research, 2017; McDowell et al., 2016). This fraction
is called “site’s purchase conversion rate”. Considering that current
online retail is estimated at more than 460 billion dollars, according to
Forrester Research (2017), even a small improvement in a site’s pur-
chase conversion rate will yield a significant increase in revenue
(Sismeiro and Bucklin, 2004).
Understanding online behavior is the subject of a long line of re-
search in marketing, aimed at gaining insight into shoppers’ decision
process, and apply this understanding for marketing, improving the
visitors’ shopping experience and increasing sales. Most of the previous
research explored the online behavior of returning shoppers. The online
behavior and purchase intent of anonymous visitors was researched to a
lesser extent, as they cannot be profiled (Suh et al., 2004; Schäfer and
Kummer, 2013; Baumann et al., 2018). side, employ a variety of tools to
improve purchase conversion rate, among which are recommender
systems and personal automated shoppers, aimed at converting non-
shoppers to shoppers (Kim and Yum, 2011). Gaining insights on
anonymous visitors and their navigation and decision process is crucial
automated shoppers (Kim and Yum, 2011). To that end, understanding
the current purchase intent of shoppers is rudiment. Moreover, being
able to identify whether a session will end without a purchase, can help
sellers to take actions to address shoppers’ needs and preferences better
and to increase the conversion rate (Kim et al., 2003; McDowell et al.,
2016).
Lately, as a way to enrich the limited information about online
shoppers, Pinterest Research has published a large-scale study in-
vestigating how the cross-platform activity of users may build up over
time into a purchase intent (Lo et al., 2016). Still, learning from pre-
vious visits can help only with predicting the purchase intent of re-
turning customers, who are identified. It cannot help in the case of
anonymous returning shoppers, first-time visitors, or occasional anon-
ymous shoppers. Occasional online shopping is known to be prevalent
and accounts for almost half of the online purchases (Pew Research
Center, 2016). Understanding and correctly classifying the current
purchase intent of online visitors that have no prior history is essential
for a site’s ability to target these visitors with accurate online help.
Anonymous visitors, even if are returning, might be turned into shop-
pers with the right recommendations or aid. Classifying the purchase
intent of anonymous visitors might also help in understanding the
factors that lead to an impulse purchase of visitors that do not have a
history of acquisitions in the site (Cobb and Hoyer, 1986; Chan et al.,

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: omokryn@univ.haifa.ac.il (O. Mokryn).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2019.100836
Received 4 October 2018; Received in revised form 3 February 2019; Accepted 9 February 2019
Available online 26 February 2019
1567-4223/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
O. Mokryn, et al.
2017). We refer to an unidentified visitor as anonymous, as there is no
known shopping history of this visitor in the site. this type of visitors,
with no history at the site, as anonymous.
Inferring the purchase intent of visitors with no historical in-
formation is challenging, as there is no data about the visitor for
building their profile. When the purchase intent of anonymous visitors
has been considered, studies have hitherto assumed a fixed baseline
value (Sismeiro and Bucklin, 2004; Park and Park, 2016; ?) or a per-
domain baseline value of purchase intent (Suh et al., 2004; Moe and
Fader, 2004; Ding et al., 2015; Panagiotelis et al., 2014). first-time may
be viewed as first-time shoppers in this context.
We investigate here the question of how to determine the purchase
intent of anonymous visitors from their current session information,
and how to utilize it to predict whether the session will end up with a
purchase. We suggest to consider the clickstream of visitors and to
check the recent trend of products popularity they explore (i.e., click
on) as a means for understanding their purchase intent. This trend of
product popularity can be thought of as the site’s local view of the
overall perceived product popularity and success. Product popularity is
known to affect product success (Hanson and Putler, 1996; Salganik
et al., 2006; Cai et al., 2009; Tucker and Zhang, 2011), but has been
found to be trending with time (Tsymbal, 2004), even on a scale of days
(Srinivasan and Mekala, 2014). To conform to the locality in time, we
check only the recent trajectory (i.e., trend) of the popularity of pro-
ducts (“product trendiness”). trendiness of products that first-time
visitors view during their session is a key predictor of their purchase
intent. We are also interested in the temporal aspects of the visit, i.e., on
which day of the week and in which period of the year the Web site is
visited. The work of Lo et al. (2016), using Pinterest dataset, found that
these are predictive features for personal purchase intent. We are ex-
tending this aspect to see whether the temporal aspects have a general
effect on the shopping intent of anonymous visitors. We also take into
account the length of the anonymous visitors’ sessions (in the number of
clicks) as a feature and discuss how to use it for predictions.
We build an elaborate purchase intent modeling algorithm for
anonymous visitors, utilizing the visitor’s session’s temporal char-
acteristics, number of clicks and product trendiness. prediction algo-
rithm over each of the datasets, tailoring the temporal features per site,
and receive a highly accurate purchase intent prediction using en-
semble classifiers. design an elaborate purchase intent prediction al-
gorithm for first-time visitors, utilizing these features. We present an
analysis of two large datasets from real and active e-commerce sites,
each containing tens of millions of sessions of visiting users collected
during the period 2012–2014. We evaluate the performance of our in-
ference algorithm using an ensemble of classifiers (Ricci et al., 2015)
over each of the datasets. Given that the visitor’s sessions’ temporal
information differ between the sites, the inference algorithm is adapted
to account for this difference. We further show that our results are
competitive against a state-of-the-art deep learning technique that
mines recurrent patterns utilizing neural networks. A general frame-
work that does not take into account site-specific temporal details is
presented and evaluated as well. Our good inference results for the
purchase intent of anonymous visitors over both datasets support our
hypotheses.
In addition to purchase intent inference the method is applicable for
cold start situations. Employing our method would enable websites to
replace the initial fixed baseline value of purchase intent for anon-
ymous visitors with a personalized purchase intent value. fixed baseline
intent estimation. current initial purchase intent on top of the baseline
for returning customers. Our approach is also applicable for boot-
strapping new e- commerce sites after a few days, where no prior in-
formation is available on any of the customers or products, and give a
dynamically calculated intent baseline during the session.
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 34 (2019) 100836
2. Related work
A low conversion rate in online shopping is a widely recognized
problem for e-commerce sites (Moe and Fader, 2004; Venkatesh and
Agarwal, 2006; Panagiotelis et al., 2014). The online environment in-
troduces inherent barriers for purchase, such as the shoppers’ inclina-
tion to accept the involved technology, their perception of the site and
their ability to trust it (Deng and Poole, 2010; Gefen et al., 2003; Pavlou
and Fygenson, 2006; Zhou et al., 2007; Amaro and Duarte, 2015); On
the other hand, it offers a plethora of information, and thus shoppers
may browse many sites before making a decision (Pavlou and Fygenson,
2006). Senecal et al., 2005 show that shoppers tend to search more
online than they do offline, and get involved in a rather complex
browsing behavior. Further, browsing is not only done for goal- or-
iented reasons such as purchasing, but also for experiential reasons,
e.g., the shopping experience itself (Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2001;
Scarpi et al., 2014).
Assessing visitors purchase intentions correctly can help sites in
converting visitors to shoppers by showing them recommendations or
suggesting assistance (Lu et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2017).
2.1. Predicting purchase intent utilizing clickstream data
Tracking and modeling behaviors over recurrent visits have been
the focus of much research. Shoppers, in a search for information,
browse and compare prices over different sites. Their final choice of site
to purchase depends, among other things, on the stickiness of the site
(Venkatesh and Agarwal, 2006; Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2001;
Panagiotelis et al., 2014). Popular (sticky) sites can then log their
visitors’ online browsing sequences (clickstream data) over time, as
well as additional information, to gain knowledge of their online be-
havior and predict their purchase intent. Clickstream data gives a
competitive edge to sites and enables researchers to understand and
model online actions, and use it for predictions (Bucklin et al., 2002;
Bucklin and Sismeiro, 2009; Olbrich and Holsing, 2011; Lo et al., 2016).
Moe, 2003 identifies different behavior types of online shoppers from
their clickstream data, creating a typology of shopping strategies. The
intent is built over time when shoppers browse or search for informa-
tion while planning a future purchase. This type of search is either di-
rected or exploratory. Immediate purchases occur when a shopper visits
a site with the intent to make a purchase. Hedonic browsing, derived
from the shopping experience itself, may also result in an immediate
purchase.
Moe and Fader, 2004 model individual conversion dynamics for
visitors based on the above typology. They assume a baseline intent that
is gamma distributed and model the personal development of the intent
over time to predict a purchase. Montgomery et al. (2004) model na-
vigation patterns of recurring visits as a Markov chain, and find that six
prior visits are enough to learn and predict the personal intent of re-
current shoppers. Other models include modeling of completed tasks
(Sismeiro and Bucklin, 2004; Su and Chen, 2015), and graph mining
over navigation between tasks (Kalczynski et al., 2006).
Recent models consider dynamic behavioral patterns that we also
take into account. Park and Park, 2016 model the user’s visit dynamics
over time as clusters, where close-by visits are clustered and between
clusters are periods of no visits. They find that the conversion rates are
higher at later visits in the clusters than at earlier ones. Modeling these
temporal dynamics for visitors, they predict the purchase intent using a
Bayesian learning model. Baumann et al. (2018) follow visitors navi-
gation paths, modeling each session as a navigation graph that is up-
dated with every click. They use graph metrics to determine purchase
intentions. Bhatnagar et al. (2016) find that the length of the first visit
predicts the possibility of next visits, and model online behavior uti-
lizing visit dynamics and navigation information. Like us, they also
consider temporal information, such as the day of the week and the
time of day. They determine a time window in which the visitor is more
O. Mokryn, et al.
likely to purchase, however their model depends on the personalization
of the visitors, and therefore cannot be applied to the case of anon-
ymous shoppers.
More similar to our approach is the use of machine learning on
clickstream data to predict individual intent. Common in this case is the
use of the dynamics of visits, e.g., the frequency of visits, time from last
visit, and in-session dynamics (like dwell time, the time spent viewing a
page). Findings show that the rate of visits and dwell time increase
when the visitor is close to the purchase. Each visitor is then char-
acterized by these dynamics, as well as their current session’s dynamics
and additional information that is available (such as their demo-
graphics, detailed clickstream and product information, purchase his-
tory, social interactions and influence, and more). Conversion predic-
tion is then made for either the current or the next visit (Van den Poel
and Buckinx, 2005; Bucklin and Sismeiro, 2009; Lukose et al., 2008; Su
and Chen, 2015; Lo et al., 2016; Kooti et al., 2016; Raphaeli et al.,
2017). We consider the case of anonymous visitors that do not have
prior history in the site, nor do we know their social network.
When no information on the visitor exists, as is the case of first-time
or anonymous visitors, understanding their current, real-time intent, is
challenging. Polites et al. (2018) find a misalignment between online
shoppers’ initial intention and the outcome of their online visit, i.e.,
some of those stating they are in the browsing phase and do not intend
to buy end the visit with a purchase, while others, starting with the
intention to buy, do not. Purchasing without prior intent, or impulse
purchase accounts for many of the online transactions (Chan et al.,
2017). While some of the visitors have a predisposition to purchase,
others might be inclined or driven to impulse purchases. Research on
websites stimuli that may trigger an impulse purchase considers the
site’s visibility and cues embedded in it, such as promotions, persuasive
aids, etc. (Jeffrey and Hodge, 2007; Wells et al., 2011; Chan et al.,
2017). In our work we do not consider the initial intent of the visitor,
nor can we assume their predisposition to purchase or impulsive
shopping.
2.2. Products’ temporal dynamics and trends
Product popularity information is known to affect its success, and
people tend to consume more products perceived as popular (Hanson
and Putler, 1996; Salganik et al., 2006; Cai et al., 2009; Tucker and
Zhang, 2011). The temporal nature of popularity, though, is unstable.
In many scenarios in our lives (TV program consumption, product
purchase, tweet topics and so on) our interests change with time, in a
process known as concept drift (Widmer and Kubat, 1996; Tsymbal,
2004; Krawczyk et al., 2017). Concept drift can be sudden, or gradual,
changing slowly with time. Systems for handling concept drift differ
according to the type of change they handle (Tsymbal, 2004): (1) In-
stance selection, where the goal is to select instances that are relevant
to the current time window; (2) Instance weighting, were instances are
weighted based on their estimated relevance; and (3) Ensemble
learning, handling the family of predictors that are weighted per their
relevance to the present time. Among the three, the first is more re-
levant to our research.
Concept drift is naturally linked to temporal trends. Temporal
trends have been shown to govern general interests (Mokryn et al.,
2016), and are studied not only in recommender systems (Choi and
Varian, 2012; Dias and Fonseca, 2013; Koren, 2010; Lathia et al., 2010;
Srinivasan and Mekala, 2014) but also in general Web search. Google
Trends 1 uses the time series index of the volume of submitted queries.
For example, the volume of queries on a particular brand of a watch
during the second week of May might be helpful in predicting June
sales for that brand. Choi and Varian (2012) use Google Trends to de-
monstrate that Google queries help predict economic activity.
1 2
https://trends.google.com/trends/.
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 34 (2019) 100836
Indeed, a recent work shows that product popularity is trending in
nature, and changes with time: Tang (Srinivasan and Mekala, 2014)
find that the trendiness of products changes with time, week by week,
or even day by day, due to either user interest change, demand shifts
ignited by some external events, or just because a product is out of
inventory.
Item popularity and user ratings over time are studied by Koren
(2010) in a different context, showing that temporal dynamics can af-
fect user preferences. We further examine whether these temporal dy-
namics, as well as the trendiness of the viewed products, are predictors
of the user’s current purchase intent.
2.3. Session-based recommenders
The study of session-based recommenders is a growing trend,
especially in the music domain, as described next. Park et al. (2011)
have coined in this reference the term Session-based Collaborative
Filtering (SSCF) and present a modified user-based CF that relies on
session information that captures sequence patterns and repetitiveness
in the users’ listening process. Their goal is to predict which song will
be played next given past sessions. When a song is played, an event
describing the user and song (item), with the corresponding time stamp,
is created. A session is defined as a sequence of per-user events within a
specific continuous time frame. Then, session similarity is calculated
using the cosine distance between each pair of sessions. The items’ log
data is used as implicit feedback. In their experimental results, using log
data from Bugs Music (one of the biggest music services in Korea), they
show that SSCF outperforms the basic CF. Zheleva et al. (2010) develop
a session-based hierarchical graphical model using Latent Dirichlet
Allocation and show that their model can facilitate playlist completion
based on previous listening sessions or songs that the user has just lis-
tened to. Using the Zune2 Social music community as a test bed, they
model a song listening process by two graphical models with latent
variables. The first one, the taste model, is characterized by a set of
tastes or media preferences of a specific community. The second one,
the session model, is where each song the user has listened to is defined
as a finite combination of listening moods. They show that from the
perplexity perspective there is a clear advantage in using a session-
based model for characterizing user preferences in the social media
content. Dias and Fonseca (2013) improve music recommendations by
adding temporal context and session’ diversity factors into the analysis
of music sessions. Their purpose is to recommend to the user the next
song to listen to. They represent each session using five features: time of
day (users tend to listen to different songs at different periods of the
day), weekday (users’ song preferences are different in weekdays and
weekends), day of month (users tend to listen to more happy music in
the beginning of the month and more sad one towards the end), month
(users’ preferences are not the same during different seasons), and song
diversity. They show that the inclusion of temporal information, either
explicitly or implicitly, increase the accuracy of the recommendations
significantly when compared with traditional Session-based CF. A
fundamental difference from our work is that playlists are longer se-
quences compared with shopping sessions. Additionally, they did not
use dwell time, and did not consider the song’s popularity. Jannach
et al. (2017) and Jannach et al. (2015) incorporate long-term pre-
ferences into a next music track generation. They distinguish two types
of preferences: short-term history (current session) and long-term his-
tory (previous sessions), considering repeated tracks, co-occurrences of
the tracks, favorite singers and social friends’ track preferences. They
combine all into a multi-faceted scoring scheme to provide the best
recommendation for the next track in the playlist.
Classification: In recommender systems, one common practice is to
use ensembles of classifiers (Ricci et al., 2015). Any hybrid technique
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune.
O. Mokryn, et al.
that combines the results of several classifiers could be seen as an en-
semble method. Netflix winners (Bell et al., 2007) used a combination
of many different methods in their study. The two most common en-
semble techniques are Bagging and Boosting Ricci et al. (2015). Bag-
ging (Bootstrap Aggregation) was initially proposed by Breiman (1996),
and it combines outputs from several machine learning techniques for
improving the performance and stability of prediction or classification.
This technique is a special form of the averaging model (Hoeting et al.,
1999). In our experiment, we use three classifiers: Bagging, NBTree,
and Logistic Regression. WEKA (Hall et al., 2009) enables the use of
different base-learn classifiers for Bagging.
3. Datasets description
The data in this study is comprised of two datasets of clickstream
events from two e-commerce websites, each representing a different
domain of goods, as detailed below.
Both datasets are anonymized and contain clickstream log in-
formation for extended periods.
To predict the real-time intent of anonymous visitors we treat each
session as a separate visit of an anonymous visitor and do not consider
user information. Yet, in our datasets, there are possibly repeated visits
by users. We explain here why treating each session as an anonymous
session strengthens our results. Previous works found that in cases
where shoppers are searching for information a repeated process in
which the time in-between visits decreases captures well their behavior
(Moe and Fader, 2004; Kalczynski et al., 2006; Van den Poel and
Buckinx, 2005; Bucklin and Sismeiro, 2009; Lukose et al., 2008; Su and
Chen, 2015; Lo et al., 2016; Kooti et al., 2016; Raphaeli et al., 2017).
However, recent work showed that shoppers might change their mind
during their online visit (Polites et al., 2018). By treating each session
as an anonymous independent session, we make no prior assumptions
on the purchase intent of the user, do not consider previous behavior
and patterns, and learn solely from the session dynamics whether it will
end with a purchase.
The datasets contain real visits of users, some are anonymous, some
repeating customers. We handle each session separately, and do not
consider personal information. This enables us to model every session
as belonging to an unknown visitor, and hence we do not collect user
information or previous visit dynamics.
3.1. YooChoose RecSys dataset
Our primary dataset is the YooChoose RecSys challenge dataset,
representing six months of user activities in a large European e-com-
merce business that sells a variety of consumer goods including garden
tools, toys, clothes, electronics, and more (Ben-Shimon et al., 2015).
The YooChoose dataset contains two log files: a click events log, and a
purchase events log. The click events log consists of a list of click events
on items. Each such event is associated with the session id, a timestamp
(the time when the click occurred), the item id, and the category of the
item. The purchase events log consists of purchase events from sessions
that appear in the click events log and end with a purchase. Each entry
contains a session id, a timestamp (the time when the purchase oc-
curred), and details on the purchased item - the item id, the price, and
the quantity. The sessions vary in terms of length, the number of clicks,
and the number of items clicked on. Sessions’ lengths last from a few
minutes to a few hours and the number of clicks varies from one click to
a few hundred in a session, depending on the user’s activity.
Table 1 presents the main characteristics of the YooChoose click-
stream events, i.e., the number of sessions that end with a purchase
(Buying sessions), the number of sessions in the dataset that do not end
up with a purchase (Non-buying sessions), the overall number of clicks
and the overall number of items. Only 5.5% of the sessions end up with
a purchase. The average number of clicks per session is roughly 2.8,
with the majority of sessions ending within less than three clicks.
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 34 (2019) 100836
Table 1
YooChoose dataset general data statistics.
Name Clicks Buying sessions Non-buying sessions Items
YooChoose 3,3003,944 509,696 8,740,032 52,739
However, the distribution is a right-skewed one, with sessions lasting
over more than 40 clicks.
Fig. 1 depicts the distribution of sessions’ lengths, measured by the
number of clicks, for sessions that ended with a purchase (termed
buying sessions), and for those that did not (termed non-buying ses-
sions). It is quite easy to see that the non-buying sessions are much
shorter than buying sessions. About 80% of the sessions contain be-
tween 1 and 4 sessions, while 40% of the sessions are 2-clicks sessions.
This is quite understandable, as users are not happy with what they
looked at and abandon the search. On the other hand, buying sessions
have a much longer tail. Unlike the non-buying sessions, the percentage
of 1-click buying sessions is small (4% compared with 14% 1-click non-
buying sessions) while 2-click buying sessions is the largest portion
(about 22% of the buying sessions) Then the percentage decreases
gradually, but in a much moderate rate compared with the non-buying
sessions. This behavior seems to be quite understandable as users tend
to better examine items they are about to purchase - they may want to
learn more about them and possibly compare several options. We can
see that in both cases most of the sessions are 2-clicks long: they ac-
count for almost 40% of non-buying sessions, and 20% of buying ses-
sions. Next come 3-click sessions, which account for 17.6% and 14.5%,
respectively. The third-place diverges between non-buying sessions (1-
click sessions, 14.2%), and buying sessions (4-click sessions, 11.3%).
3.2. Zalando dataset
The second dataset we use is an anonymized click log from
Zalando3, a large European online fashion retailer, used previously for
session-based recommendations (Tavakol and Brefeld, 2014). Every
click is associated with a timestamp, the attributes of the viewed item,
user ID, and the clicked items. The dataset is richer in details, and more
attributes are associated with each product than in the YooChoose da-
taset. However, to validate our results across these domains, we limit
ourselves to the use of the features used in the YooChoose dataset.
Table 2 describes the total number of clicks, items, and sessions in the
dataset.
Here we see longer sessions on average, namely 8.11 clicks per
session on average, and a larger percentage (5.9%) of sessions that end
in a purchase.
4. Modeling dynamics in E-commerce sessions
Modeling the purchase intent of an anonymous visitor can be
thought of as modeling the purchase intent of an anonymous visitor
during their session, i.e., during an anonymous session. To understand
the characteristics of anonymous sessions that end with a purchase, we
quantify the dynamics of e-commerce sessions. Each session is con-
sidered as a distinguishable visit of an anonymous visitor. We char-
acterize the dynamics of each session by the trendiness of the viewed
products, the clickstream, and the session’s temporal characteristics, as
detailed below. We define the recent trendiness of each product and
consider a session to be as trendy as the trendiest product in it.
4.1. Modeling products recent trendiness in purchasing sessions
We consider here a local view of products’ popularity, in terms of
3
www.zalando.com
O. Mokryn, et al.
Fig. 1. Distribution of the number of clicks per sessions, YooChoose dataset.
Table 2
Zalando dataset general data statistics.
Name Clicks Buying sessions Non-buying sessions Items
Zalando 224,175,394 1,647,738 25,976,224 350
both space and time. We use the site’s local information about the
products, and refer to this view as the ‘local popularity’ of products.
Similarly, we are interested in the recent trend of the products’ popu-
larity, rather than their historical popularity information. Hence, the
modeled trend of popularity is the recent local trajectory of the popu-
larity of each product within site, for purchasing customers. A product
is considered trendy if in the last several days before the analyzed session it
had been viewed in a non- decreasing number of sessions that ended with a
purchase.
To model the trendiness of products let us define the following
process: Both YooChoose and Zalando datasets are split into two
random subsets, a learning subset and an experimental one. 80% of the
sessions are used as the learning subset for the learning phase
(Temporal Model Building Data), and the remaining 20% are used for
experimentation (Experimental Data). The proportion of buying and
non-buying sessions (5% vs. 95%) is similar in these two subsets of the
datasets. We split the sessions in the learning subset, i.e., in the
Temporal Model Building Data, into two corresponding lookup tables.
The first, PS, is for sessions that ended with a purchase, and the NPS
table is for sessions that did not end with a purchase. Each entry in the
PS table (or NPS table) corresponds to a tuple of 〈day, producti 〉, de-
picting the number of sessions that the product was viewed at that day,
that ended with a purchase (or did not end with a purchase, respec-
tively).
Table 3 shows an example of the PS table for three consecutive days.
In these days, Product1 was viewed in 6, 8, and 9 sessions that ended
with a purchase, while Product2 was viewed in each of these days in 5
sessions that ended with a purchase, and Product3 in 7, 5, and 4 such
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 34 (2019) 100836
Table 3
PS Table example from the YooChoose dataset.
Product Day 91 Day 92 Day 93 Trend
Product1 6 8 9 Increasing
Product2 5 5 5 Non-decreasing
Product3 7 5 4 Decreasing
sessions. The data was extracted from the YooChoose Buying Table. The
days are counted by their numerical offset from the date the dataset
begins with. Let us assume we model the product trendiness over a
period of three days4. Defining trendy products as products partici-
pating in a non-decreasing number of sessions that ended with a pur-
chase within a predefined time window, then in this example Product1
is a trendy product with an increasing trend, Product2 is trendy with a
stable non- decreasing trend, and Product3 has a decreasing trend and,
therefore, is not a trendy product.
We further determine the average trendiness of products, and the
corresponding trendiness of a session, as explained below.
4.2. Modeling the trendiness of products and sessions
We define a session to be as trendy as the trendiest products in it. To
that end, we determine the average trendiness of each product at time t,
denoted in days. For a given chosen time window size of n days, the
average recent trendiness of a product i is a factor of the number of
sessions it was viewed in that ended with a purchase, divided by the
overall number of sessions it was viewed in. Let product i’s overall
performance in a time window n be determined as the overall number
4
the window size for determining the trendiness of products over sessions
that end with a purchase is a parameter. Section 5.1 evaluates the results ob-
tained for different time windows.
O. Mokryn, et al.
of sessions it was viewed in during the preceding n days, Pin . Then,
Pin (t ) = Σtj−=1t − n − 1 (PS (j, i) + NPS (j, i)) (1)
calculated as the sum of the number of buying sessions in which i was
clicked on with the number of non-buying sessions in which it was
clicked on during these days. The average trendiness TD of a product i
at day t is then defined as follows:
Σtj−=1t − n − 1PS (j, i)
TDin (t ) = = recurrent patterns and utilizes neural networks (RNN).
Pin (t ) (2)
#of buying sessions product i was viewed in during the preceding n days
= different time windows of time t); number of clicks; temporal parameters
#of overall sessions product i was viewed in during the preceding n days
(3)
We can now proceed to model the trendiness of current sessions
(i.e., in our example, sessions occurring at day t), using the trendiness of
the products viewed in them. If we define a session of length k, denoted
by Sk , as a sequence of k views of products on a site (with possible
repetitions), then, a session Sk at day t will be as trendy as the trendies
product viewed in it:
TD Sk (t ) = max TDin (t ), i ∈ Sk
i (4)
4.3. Modeling temporal and clickstream characteristics of a session
Additional temporal characteristics were used for modeling a ses-
sion in both datasets. However, the temporal characteristics differ be-
tween the YooChoose and Zalando datasets, denoted with Y and Z re-
spectively:
MonthY: Some months are more prone to purchases than others. For
example, the YooChoose dataset spans seven months, from April to
September. During this time, August was the month with the highest
purchase conversion rate.
Day of the weekY: People behave differently on different days of
the week. For example, in the YooChoose dataset we found that
people tend to purchase more on Sundays and Mondays than on
other days.
Dwell timeY: Dwell time, the time a customer spends on viewing a
particular page or a product, has been recently linked to the interest
the customer has in the product (Yi et al., 2014; Bogina and Kuflik,
2017). Here, we use the session’s latency.
Day number from the beginning of the datasetZ: As the Zalando
dataset does not include the dates, we use the number of days offset
from the beginning of the dataset.
Additionally, we use the number of clicks in a session. This feature
has been previously found important in several studies, as described
in Section 2.1.
Number of clicks in a sessionY, Z defines the length of a session in
number of clicks. Clearly, as the same product can be clicked-on
several times within a session, this value does not necessarily cor-
relates with the number of viewed products. It is used as an addi-
tional feature for both datasets.
6
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 34 (2019) 100836
Fig. 2. Evaluation Flow.
5. Evaluating purchase intention in an anonymized session
Our goal is to determine the purchase intent of anonymous visitors
from their session’s dynamic characteristics, as modeled above. To that
end we consider each session as a distinguishable visit of an anonymous
visitor. We train an ensemble of classifiers, as well as the XGBoost
classifier, and further examine the effect of the different dynamics
modeled. We compare our results to deep learning technique that mines
For the classification task, each session is modeled with the fol-
lowing set of features: max product trendiness (TD Sk (t ) , calculated over
of the session. YooChoose and Zalando differ in the available temporal
parameters, as described in Section 4.2. Therefore, the temporal para-
meters used for modeling the YooChoose dataset sessions are: Day of the
week; Month the session took place in, and the session’s Dwell time. The
temporal parameters used for the Zalando dataset sessions are: Day
number from the beginning of the dataset.
Fig. 2 depicts our design flow for trendiness’ modeling. We learn the
global trendiness information over 80% of the data. We then take the
remaining 20% of the data, termed test set. In the Figure, this set is in
the Session Generation. We then perform SMOTE over the test set, and
divide the test set to ten folds, learn from 90% of the test set, and
evaluate our results over each of the remaining 10%.
Recall that each of the two datasets we have, YooChoose and
Zalando, has been split into two subsets. The first, consisting of 80% of
the data, is used for the modeling, and the second, consisting of 20% of
the sessions, is used for experimentations (test part). Each of these sets
keeps the original characteristics of imbalanced data, as only less than
6% of the sessions end with a purchase. Classifiers working well with
imbalanced data, perform well while classifying the main items be-
longing to the main category, but poorly otherwise (Chawla et al.,
2002). To overcome this imbalance, we use SMOTE (Chawla et al.,
2002), a combination of over-sampling and under- sampling techni-
ques. SMOTE combines Informed over-sampling of the minority class
with the random under-sampling of the majority class. We conduct 10-
fold cross-validation experiments on the test part of the dataset, which
was not used for modeling.
We train an ensemble of classifiers (Ricci et al., 2015), namely
Bagging, NBTree and Logistic Regression (Hall et al., 2009), and a state-
of-the-art boosting machine learning method, XGBoost (Chen and
Guestrin, 2016). WEKA data mining software (Hall et al., 2009) enables
the use of different base-learn classifiers For Bagging we use the fol-
lowing: Reduced Error Pruning Tree (“REPTree”) (Srinivasan and
Mekala, 2014), which is a quick decision tree learner that is built upon
the information gain; NBTree (Kohavi, 1996), a hybrid of decision trees
with Naive Bayes classifiers that learn from instances that reach the
decision trees’ leaves; and Logistic Regression (Hosmer et al., 2013),
where the binary dependent variable is categorical, as is the case with
our prediction of purchase. XGBoost5 is used with max depth of seven
and grid search.
Our experimental results show that using temporal and dynamic
characteristics of the products and the sessions we are able to achieve a
good classification for whether a session ends up with a purchase or not.
5
https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost.
O. Mokryn, et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 34 (2019) 100836

Fig. 3. YooChoose: Aggregated number of sessions with trending products over different time windows, compared to the number of sessions with non-trending
products.

Preliminary results calculated with ensemble methods over the Table 4

YooChoose dataset, with a fixed time window of three days (Bogina YooChoose: Quality of prediction (F1) of purchase intent over different time
et al., 2016) gave very good classification measures, with the Bagging windows.
classifier giving a precision of 0.937 , and AUC = 0.939. Here, we deepen Days Features Logistic Bagging NBTree XGBoost
the understanding of the effect of different session dynamics as well as
the time window used for learning, and compare our results over both 2 days With Trendiness 0.739 0.904 0.916 0.7853
Without Trendiness 0.733 0.886 0.888 0.765
the YooChoose and Zalando datasets, enabling a cross-domain and
cross-site evaluation of our model. 3 days With Trendiness 0.72 0.886 0.899 0.798
Without Trendiness 0.71 0.854 0.855 0.76
5.1. Products trendiness over time
4 days With Trendiness 0.7 0.882 0.883 0.8236
Without Trendiness 0.686 0.816 0.817 0.758
To calculate products trendiness, we first plot the number of ses-
sions that trending products were viewed during different time win- 5 days With Trendiness 0.68 0.889 0.867 0.8559
dows in the YooChoose dataset. Fig. 3 depicts the total number of Without Trendiness 0.664 0.786 0.786 0.75
sessions on consecutive days in which products were trending in (a non-
6 days With Trendiness 0.677 0.899 0.873 0.9
decreasing trend of clicks), for time windows that span from two to six Without Trendiness 0.65 0.796 0.795 0.7788
days. We chose this range as the total number of sessions that contain
the same product over seven consecutive days is negligible, with only
175 such sessions with trending products that end with a purchase. The decreases, in which case taking into account the product trendiness
calculation is applied to the entire dataset. As expected, there are more improves the prediction. However, when only the very recent history is
such sessions in shorter time periods than longer ones, and the same taken into account, the temporal features give a prediction result that is
proportion of sessions end with a purchase compared to the global almost as good as the one that includes recent product trendiness. Re-
dataset (around 5%). cency improves the effect of the temporal features on the quality of the
prediction of the purchase intent when using ensemble methods. To
5.2. The effect of session temporal features and product trendiness over further understand which features contribute most to the prediction, we
different window sizes applied WEKA’s automatic feature selection algorithm to the Yoo-
Choose dataset for all features (after SMOTE). The algorithm selected
First, to deepen our understanding of the effect of the trendiness of trendiness and the number of clicks. Hence, the very recent click be-
products viewed on the estimated purchase intent, we evaluate the havior in the site is indeed a good predictor. The use of product tren-
quality of the estimation with and without trendiness, and over several diness improves the prediction accuracy over all selected time win-
time windows. We compare the prediction of each of the four classifiers dows, for all four classifiers. The effect of trendiness for the longer time
to the other three. windows is surprising, considering that the number of sessions with
Table 4 depicts the purchase intent classification performance for trending products over five or six days is rather small, and may indicate
the YooChoose dataset over the different time windows showing all a higher predictive power for products trending over these longer
classifiers predictions F1-measures. For each time window, we compare periods. The effect of trendiness for longer time windows improves
the performance of the model over the different classifiers with and XGBoost’s prediction quality, with the highest value (F1-measure of
without taking product trendiness into account. Product trendiness 0.9) over a time window of six days.
improves the purchase intent estimation over all examined window For Zalando the available temporal information is the session’s
sizes significantly, with p -value <0.03 for T-tests performed for all time offset in days from the beginning of the dataset. We use this temporal
windows. Interestingly, when the temporal features are taken over a information along with the number of clicks and product trendiness,
larger time window, the ensemble classifiers’ prediction quality that were found important for the YooChoose dataset. Table 5 presents

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O. Mokryn, et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 34 (2019) 100836

Table 5 Table 6
Zalando-Quality of prediction (F1) of purchase intent over different time win- Prediction results (F1) of the general comparative model.
dows.
Time-Window Classifier Datasets
Days Features Logistic Bagging NBTree XGBoost
Yoochoose Zalendo
2 days With Trendiness 0.702 0.859 0.905 0.7554
Without Trendiness 0.701 0.745 0.731 0.7281 2 days logistic 0.644 0.686
Bagging 0.784 0.76
3 days With Trendiness 0.702 0.892 0.892 0.7543 NBTree 0.717 0.741
Without Trendiness 0.701 0.761 0.735 0.7222 XGBoost 0.6486 0.7335

4 days With Trendiness 0.705 0.859 0.806 0.7861 3 days logistic 0.629 0.686
Without Trendiness 0.7 0.807 0.762 0.7246 Bagging 0.786 0.777
NBTree 0.717 0.763
5 days With Trendiness 0.725 0.876 0.848 0.8681 XGBoost 0.65127 0.72201
Without Trendiness 0.718 0.87 0.825 0.7409
4 days logistic 0.616 0.686
6 days With Trendiness 0.761 0.893 0.883 0.9438 Bagging 0.77 0.766
Without Trendiness 0.755 0.896 0.875 0.786 NBTree 0.7 0.714
XGBoost 0.65309 0.7187

5 days logistic 0.613 0.684

the quality of the prediction of purchase intent over different time
windows showing all classifier prediction F1-measures. At each time
window, we compare the results with and without the trendiness. The
trendiness of products improves the prediction across number of clicks
and the temporal information when recent history is considered, and
was found significant using a T-test only for a time window of four
( p -value = 0.05). These results are somewhat different than the ones of
YooChoose, where trendiness has a larger positive effect on prediction
in longer time windows. This, however, can be attributed to the dif-
ference in the available temporal history between the two datasets. For
XGBoost, as is the case with the YooChoose dataset, the effect of tren-
diness for longer time win improves its prediction quality, with the
highest value (F1-measure of 0.94) over a time window of six days.
Prediction with recurrent neural networks We further compare our
results with a deep learning technique that mines recurrent patterns
utilizing neural networks (RNN). RNN is considered the state-of-the- art
in e-commerce within sessions next click prediction recommendations
(Hidasi et al., 2015; Hidasi et al., 2016; Quadrana et al., 2017), though,
as far as we know, it has not been previously used for in-session intent
prediction. Here, we represent each session as a sequence of clicked
items. Due to the imbalanced nature of our datasets, we perform a
downsampling of the data, such that the number of sessions that end up
with a purchase is equal to the number of sessions that do not. The
classification task is then to predict whether a session ends up with a
purchase. RNN achieves an F1-measure of 0.84 for the YooChoose
dataset, and an F1-measure of 0.80 for Zalando.
5.3. General modeling of purchase intention
In order to build a general model of purchase intent for anonymous
users over the e- commerce domain, we build a representative features
set that will perform well on both datasets. Considering the two dif-
ferent datasets are in the same e-commerce domain, we use the same
features: number of clicks and trendiness, and do not consider any
temporal information. To create a valid comparison, we run SMOTE
only on these two particular features for both datasets. This way we
assure the same baseline for comparison between the results. The re-
sults are given in Table 5. Since temporal features are not explicitly
taken into account in this part of the experiment, only implicitly in the
trendiness calculation, the differences between different time windows
are negligible. Interestingly, the quality of predicting purchase inten-
tion in both datasets is similar over different time spans (especially
when using an ensemble technique, i.e., Bagging).
The general model does not take into account temporal parameters,
but rather only the products trendiness and the number of clicks. Tables
6 and 5 detail the classification results with all the model parameters,
that is: products trendiness, number of clicks, and the temporal
Bagging 0.735 0.747
NBTree 0.675 0.711
XGBoost 0.6512 0.7214
6 days logistic 0.604 0.684
Bagging 0.729 0.747
NBTree 0.674 0.711
XGBoost 0.6501 0.729
features, for the YooChoose and Zalando datasets, respectively. Com-
paring these results to the results of the general model in Table 6, it is
clear that the best results are achieved for each dataset when all the
model parameters, including the available temporal information, are
taken into account. When temporal information is not considered, as is
the case with the general model, the prediction quality decreases.
6. Discussion
This study explores factors that can reveal the purchase intent of
anonymous visitors to sites. Understanding the purchase intent of
anonymous visitors also applies to occasional shoppers (that may also
be unidentified returning shoppers) who are responsible for almost half
of all online purchases. Previous works that consider only anonymous
visitors mine the session’s clickstream data for rules, looking for known
patterns that are typical of recurrent visitors with known purchase in-
tent. Our work is the first to try to quantify unique factors that help
explain the shopping intent of anonymous and unknown occasional
visitors.
We show that sites’ visitors that view currently trending products
are more likely to purchase at the end of their visit. In our case, we
define this trendiness as not losing popularity in that site recently, in
what can be viewed as a locality in time (recency) and space (site-
centric). Interest in products is known to shift in a process described as
concept drift and explained earlier in Section 2.2. To capture this
temporal change of interest, we implement an instance time window
and detect the local trend of popularity of products in the site. While
others also have explored the strolling habits of online shoppers, the
recent local popularity of products was not considered yet. Our results
demonstrate that there is a connection between viewing trendy pro-
ducts and purchase intent. Temporal aspects of the session itself,
namely the day of the week and the time of year the session took place
in, were previously shown to be indicative of the purchase intent of
returning visitors. We show here that it is also indicative of anonymous
visitors’ shopping intent.
Building on the above, we introduce a novel classification method
that uses the temporal dynamics of products (which we term trendiness)
together with the length and temporal features of a session to classify

8
O. Mokryn, et al.
whether the session ends with a purchase.
Our datasets come from the product and retail e- commerce in-
dustries. The temporal features denoting the time of the visit differ
between both datasets. The use of sessions’ temporal features improves
the classification performance, and like trendiness, their removal is
associated with a negative impact on the result. The temporal in-
formation available for the YooChoose dataset is rich. The Zalando
dataset does not contain temporal information, and we only had the
offset in days from the starting date of the given dataset. Nevertheless,
adding this temporal information was sufficient to improve the in-
ference over all time windows that we experimented with. When tem-
poral information is not used, as is the case with our general model
(described in Section 5.3) the inference quality decreases for both da-
tasets. characteristics is a limitation of the study, as we do not compare
the same session temporal information across datasets, and therefore
cannot compare the in these cases.
The datasets used are of real visits done by registered or returning
customers, as well as anonymous visitors. Anonymous visitors might be
first-time shoppers, or returning visitors and occasional shoppers who
do not wish to register at the site. We treat each session as done by an
anonymous visitor, and model the session’s dynamics, as discussed
before. While we think that this approach is more challenging to our
model, this is also a limitation of this study.
Another limitation is the lack of use of the extensive product in-
formation available at sites. Previous works have found that shopping
intention and acceptance is influenced by product characteristics
(Pavlou and Fygenson, 2006).
Our study takes a machine learning approach to the classification of
anonymous visitors’ purchase intention. Both our datasets were im-
balanced, with 5–5.9% of the sessions ending with a purchase. There
are several known techniques to overcome imbalanced datasets. We
have observed that using SMOTE on our datasets provides better results
than using undersampling techniques. We further found that applying
SMOTE on all features is more successful than applying SMOTE only on
selected ones. classifiers provided better results when SMOTE was ap-
plied on all features and then some of the features were removed, re-
maining only with the selected ones. Additionally, w In this study, we
define the temporal features as nominal, rather than applying the nu-
meric values we used in our preliminary study (Bogina et al., 2016).
Both these changes improve the classifiers’ results compared to the
initial ones presented in the preliminary paper. For the classification
task we employ an ensemble of classifiers (Ricci et al., 2015), and
XGBoost, a novel boosting method (Chen and Guestrin, 2016). We
achieve classification with F1 measures of 0.9 and 0.94 for the datasets.
These results outperform a random baseline, which was used in these
recent empiric works Lo et al., 2016; Kooti et al., 2016. We further
achieve better quality compared to RNN, a within-session deep learning
method, which classified with F1 measures of 0.8 and 0.84 , respectively.
Generally, Bagging gives the best results for both datasets regardless of
the time window used. XGBoost seems to have a different tendency than
the ensemble methods, producing better results over the longer time
windows. This might be attributed to the smaller amount of data that is
available for longer time windows, as demonstrated in Fig. 3. Similar to
our findings, it has been reported, that while XGBoost is a common
choice in Kaggle challenges and KDD Cup competitions, yet, depending
on the dataset, ensemble methods may give better results (Bekkerman,
2015).
At the moment, we classified successfully sessions that ended with a
purchase or not. It identifies online signals for purchase intent that can
be used for online purchase prediction of anonymous visitors while their
session is undergoing. Almost half the sessions are long and involve
three or more clicks. This gives rise to a predictive paradigm, in which
our model is used for predicting the purchase intent of an unknown
visitor after three or more clicks. Predicting early that a visitor does not
intend to purchase improves the site’s ability to introduce re-
commenders and personal aids to the visitor during their visit.
9
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 34 (2019) 100836
There are interesting managerial implications to our finding. We
have considered the session’s temporal parameters, and products’ re-
cent trendiness. Temporal information was previously considered for
returning customers. Our results indicate that sites can use sessions’
temporal information for intent prediction not only for recurrent visi-
tors, but also for first-time and anonymous visitors. The temporal in-
formation we have for the YooChoose and the Zalando datasets differ,
yet in both cases it improves the prediction quality. Sites should,
therefore, consider using the full temporal information that exists per
session. Our findings on products’ trendiness contribute to under-
standing the intent of these visitors. We show that removing the pro-
duct trendiness feature negatively affects the classification accuracy for
both datasets, and more so for long time windows. Utilizing our pre-
liminary results (Bogina et al., 2016), the use of products’ recent po-
pularity in the site was applied in an e-commerce recommender system
for purchase intent prediction (Zhang et al., 2016). trendiness, as de-
fined and calculated in this study, and session length (in clicks) were
found by the feature selection process to be significant for under-
standing the purchase intent for both datasets, and yielded good pre-
diction compared to a baseline and RNN, an in-session deep learning
predictor. different time windows. We find that using very recent in-
formation for learning, in the time span of two to three days, is suffi-
cient for achieving good results. The findings from our learning process
of product trendiness over windows of consecutive days indicate a high
recency in the products’ attention span. Products are often being
viewed by visitors in up to three consecutive days, but less so in longer
windows of times.
Interestingly, the number of sessions a product is viewed in during
consecutive days, e.g., in a window of two to six consecutive days,
decreases with each day. When we consider a time window of seven
days in which we require that a product is viewed (at least once) in each
consecutive day, we find that we are left with a negligible number of
sessions, indicating a clear within-site concept drift for the vast majority
of products. Sites can thus track this temporal trending interest in
products and identify a per product trend and concept drift; suggest
products accordingly; look for patterns; and try to identify products
with correlating trends, or complementary trends.
7. Conclusions and future work
We present a method for determining the shopping intent of anon-
ymous visitors to a site. Our method uses only the visitor’s session in-
formation, namely the session temporal information, session length,
and the recent trendiness of products clicked on in that session. The
trendiness offers a local temporal view of the products’ recent popu-
larity. To detect a recent trend, we draw from machine learning tech-
niques for identifying a concept drift in popularity, and find strong
locality in time, in scale of days. We show over two separate datasets
from the retail industry that our method achieves good classification for
understanding anonymous and occasional visitors’ purchase intent. The
best intent inference is achieved when using temporal aspects together
with the session’s trendiness and the number of clicks.
The results of this work can be utilized for creating a novel real-time
recommender systems that integrates trendiness, and session temporal
information into the reasoning process of an online purchase intent
classification mechanism in sites. This mechanism may guide an online
recommender for improving the shopping experience to the benefit of
both the buyer and the seller. user’s purchase intent to identify users in
anonymized sessions with low purchase intent. These users then are
directed to recommender systems in the hope of converting them into
shoppers. setting the threshold for the number of cases participating in
a trendiness analysis will be an interesting option. Our work is a first
step towards predicting shopping intent of anonymous visitors in sites.
We find here purchase intent only at the end of the session. An inter-
esting future direction is to find how early in the session the classifier
may have a good enough recommendation. method considers sessions
O. Mokryn, et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 34 (2019) 100836

at varying lengths. In a future study we intend to learn how early in the Hall, M., Frank, E., Holmes, G., Pfahringer, B., Reutemann, P., Witten, I.H., 2009. The
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