EconBase
← All papers

CATS: Clustering-Aggregated and Time Series for Business Customer Purchase Intention Prediction

Yingjie Kuang, Tianchen Zhang, Zhen-Wei Huang, Zhongjie Zeng, Zhe-Yuan Li, Ling Huang, Yuefang Gao

arXiv 19 May 2025 · Econometrics · 1 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2505.13558 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Accurately predicting customers' purchase intentions is critical to the success of a business strategy. Current researches mainly focus on analyzing the specific types of products that customers are likely to purchase in the future, little attention has been paid to the critical factor of whether customers will engage in repurchase behavior. Predicting whether a customer will make the next purchase is a classic time series forecasting task. However, in real-world purchasing behavior, customer groups typically exhibit imbalance - i.e., there are a large number of occasional buyers and a small number of loyal customers. This head-to-tail distribution makes traditional time series forecasting methods face certain limitations when dealing with such problems. To address the above challenges, this paper proposes a unified Clustering and Attention mechanism GRU model (CAGRU) that leverages multi-modal data for customer purchase intention prediction. The framework first performs customer profiling with respect to the customer characteristics and clusters the customers to delineate the different customer clusters that contain similar features. Then, the time series features of different customer clusters are extracted by GRU neural network and an attention mechanism is introduced to capture the significance of sequence locations. Furthermore, to mitigate the head-to-tail distribution of customer segments, we train the model separately for each customer segment, to adapt and capture more accurately the differences in behavioral characteristics between different customer segments, as well as the similar characteristics of the customers within the same customer segment. We constructed four datasets and conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed CAGRU approach.

Citation extraction

43
references
50
in-text mentions
43
distinct cited
1
self-citations
6,273
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 100% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Chao Huang, Jiashu Zhao, and Dawei Yin (2021) Purchase intent forecasting with convolutional hierarchical transformer networks. In 2021 IEEE 37th International Conference on…0.73732100%
2Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber (1997) Long short-term memory0.64422100%
3Yanan Liu, Yun Tian, Yang Xu, Shifeng Zhao, Yapei Huang, Yachun Fan,… (2021) TPGN: a time-preference gate network for e-commerce purchase intention recognition0.64422100%
4John Paparrizos and Luis Gravano (2015) k-shape: Efficient and accurate clustering of time series. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGMOD international conference on man…0.64422100%
5Haoyi Zhou, Shanghang Zhang, Jieqi Peng, Shuai Zhang, Jianxin Li, Hu… (2021) Informer: Beyond efficient transformer for long sequence time-series forecasting. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artif…0.64422100%
6Priyanka E Bhaskaran, Maheswari Chennippan, and Thangavel Subramaniam (2020) Future prediction & estimation of faults occurrences in oil pipelines by using data clustering with time series forecasting0.51121100%
7I Artana, Hartina Fattah, IGJE Putra, N Sariani, M Nadir, A Asnawati… (2022) Repurchase intention behavior in B2C E-commerce0.40511100%
8Sujoy Bag, Manoj Kumar Tiwari, and Felix TS Chan (2019) Predicting the consumer's purchase intention of durable goods: An attribute-level analysis0.40511100%
9Shaojie Bai, J Zico Kolter, and Vladlen Koltun (2018) An empirical evaluation of generic convolutional and recurrent networks for sequence modeling0.40511100%
10Kasun Bandara, Christoph Bergmeir, and Slawek Smyl (2020) Forecasting across time series databases using recurrent neural networks on groups of similar series: A clustering approach0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 43 scored citations.