A Machine learning and Empirical Bayesian Approach for Predictive Buying in B2B E-commerce

In the context of developing nations like India, traditional business to business (B2B) commerce heavily relies on the establishment of robust relationships, trust, and credit arrangements between buyers and sellers. Consequently, ecommerce enterprises frequently. Established in 2016 with a vision to revolutionize trade in India through technology, Udaan is the countrys largest business to business ecommerce platform. Udaan operates across diverse product categories, including lifestyle, electronics, home and employ telecallers to cultivate buyer relationships, streamline order placement procedures, and promote special promotions. The accurate anticipation of buyer order placement behavior emerges as a pivotal factor for attaining sustainable growth, heightening competitiveness, and optimizing the efficiency of these telecallers. To address this challenge, we have employed an ensemble approach comprising XGBoost and a modified version of Poisson Gamma model to predict customer order patterns with precision. This paper provides an in-depth exploration of the strategic fusion of machine learning and an empirical Bayesian approach, bolstered by the judicious selection of pertinent features. This innovative approach has yielded a remarkable 3 times increase in customer order rates, show casing its potential for transformative impact in the ecommerce industry.

Words are not Equal: Graded Weighting Model for building Composite Document Vectors

Despite the success of distributional semantics, composing phrases from word vectors remains an important challenge. Several methods have been tried for benchmark tasks such as sentiment classification, including word vector averaging, matrix-vector approaches based on parsing, and on-the-fly learning of paragraph vectors. Most models usually omit stop words from the composition. Instead of such an yes-no decision, we consider several graded schemes where words are weighted according to their discriminatory relevance with respect to its use in the document (e.g., idf). Some of these methods (particularly tf-idf) are seen to result in a significant improvement in performance over prior state of the art. Further, combining such approaches into an ensemble based on alternate classifiers such as the RNN model, results in an 1.6% performance improvement on the standard IMDB movie review dataset, and a 7.01% improvement on Amazon product reviews. Since these are language free models and can be obtained in an unsupervised manner, they are of interest also for under-resourced languages such as Hindi as well and many more languages. We demonstrate the language free aspects by showing a gain of 12% for two review datasets over earlier results, and also release a new larger dataset for future testing (Singh,2015).