Online shopping purchasing prediction

Abstract

This project aims to understand the purchasing behavior of the consumers and make predictions about purchasing according to website metrics such as page values, bounce rates. An existing dataset is used in this project. This dataset is available in the collection of data from an e-commerce website by Google Analytics, which consists of 10 numerical and 8 categorical attributes coming from 12,330 sessions. The 'Revenue' attribute is used as the class label. The attributes that have high impact on the prediction are; "Administrative", "Administrative Duration", "Informational", "Informational Duration", "Product Related" and "Product-Related Duration". They represent the number of different types of pages visited by the visitor in that session and the total time spent in each of these page categories. The "Bounce Rate", "Exit Rate" and "Page Value" features represent the metrics measured by Google Analytics for each page in the e-commerce site. The "Special Day '' feature indicates the closeness of the site visiting time to a specific special day (e.g. Mother’s Day, Valentine's Day) in which the sessions are more likely to be finalized with a transaction. Since the purpose of this project is to predict potential purchasing using existing data, in the prediction part several machine learning algorithms such as decision trees, random forests will be applied to compare the models. The most suitable model will be chosen among these algorithms.