Estimating product-choice probabilities from recency and frequency of page views

This paper investigates the relationship between customers’ page views (PVs) and the probabilities of their product choices on e-commerce sites. For this purpose, we create a probability table consisting of product-choice probabilities for all recency and frequency combinations of each customers’ previous PVs. To reduce the estimation error when there are few training samples, we develop optimization models for estimating the product-choice probabilities that satisfy monotonicity, convexity and concavity constraints with respect to recency and frequency. Computational results demonstrate that our method has clear advantages over logistic regression and kernel-based support vector machine.