A Trust-Aware Random Walk Model for Return Propensity Estimation and Consumer Anomaly Scoring in Online Shopping

Abstract

In online shopping, most of consumers will not clear their return reasons when submitting return requests (e.g., select the option "other reasons"). Prior literature mostly investigates into the return event at the transaction level, and the underlying force of returns remains untracked. To deal with this problem, we propose a machine learning algorithm named as trust-aware random walk model (TARW). In the proposed model, four patterns of consumers can be identified in terms of return forces: (i) selfish consumers, (ii) honest consumers, (iii) fraud consumers, and (iv) irrelevant consumers. To profile consumers' return patterns, we capture consumers' similarities in order preferences and return tendencies separately. Based on consumers' similarities, we obtain a return pattern trust network by introducing the trust network and collaborative filtering algorithms. Subsequently, we develop two important applications based on the trust network: (i) estimating consumers' return propensities for product types; (ii) scoring the anomaly for consumers' returns for one product. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments with the real-world data to validate the model's effectiveness in predicting and tracing consumers' returns. With the proposed model, we can help retailers improve the conversion rates of selfish consumers, retain honest consumers, and block fraud consumers.

Department(s)

Computer Science

Comments

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFB-1004300), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61773199, 71732002), and Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of Higher Education Institutions of Jiangsu Province, China (Grant No. 2017SJB0006).

Keywords and Phrases

Collaborative Filtering; Machine Learning; Random Walk; Return Abuse; Return Pattern

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1674-733X; 1869-1919

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2019 Science China Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 May 2019

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