A Local Algorithm for Product Return Prediction in E-Commerce

With the rapid growth of e-tail, the cost to handle returned online orders also increases significantly and has become a major challenge in the ecommerce industry. Accurate prediction of product returns allows e-tailers to prevent problematic transactions in advance. However, the limited existing work for modeling customer online shopping behaviors and predicting their return actions fail to integrate the rich information in the product purchase and return history (e.g., return history, purchase-no-return behavior, and customer/product similarity). Furthermore, the large-scale data sets involved in this problem, typically consisting of millions of customers and tens of thousands of products, also render existing methods inefficient and ineffective at predicting the product returns. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose to use a weighted hybrid graph to represent the rich information in the product purchase and return history, in order to predict product returns. The proposed graph consists of both customer nodes and product nodes, undirected edges reflecting customer return history and customer/product similarity based on their attributes, as well as directed edges discriminating purchase-no-return and nopurchase actions. Based on this representation, we study a random-walk-based local algorithm for predicting product return propensity for each customer, whose computational complexity depends only on the size of the output cluster rather than the entire graph. Such a property makes the proposed local algorithm particularly suitable for processing the large-scale data sets to predict product returns. To test the performance of the proposed techniques, we evaluate the graph model and algorithm on multiple e-commerce data sets, showing improved performance over state-of-the-art methods.