AI to predict whether online shopping customers will complete a purchase

When users are shopping online, not all will end up purchasing something. Most visitors to an online shopping website, in fact, likely don't end up going through with a purchase during that web browsing session. It might be useful, though, for a shopping website to be able to predict whether a user intends to make a purchase or not: perhaps displaying different content to the user, like showing the user a discount offer if the website believes the user isn't planning to complete the purchase.

We build a nearest-neighbor classifier to solve this problem. Given information about a user — how many pages they've visited, whether they're shopping on a weekend, what web browser they're using, etc. — this classifier will predict whether or not the user will make a purchase.

We'll measure two values: sensitivity (also known as the "true positive rate") and specificity (also known as the "true negative rate") to check the accuracy of the classifier. Sensitivity refers to the proportion of positive examples that were correctly identified: in other words, the proportion of users who did go through with a purchase who were correctly identified. Specificity refers to the proportion of negative examples that were correctly identified: in this case, the proportion of users who did not go through with a purchase who were correctly identified. Our goal is to build a classifier that performs reasonably on both metrics.

Correct: 4073
Incorrect: 859
True Positive Rate: 6.37%
True Negative Rate: 76.22%

Data set provided by Sakar, C.O., Polat, S.O., Katircioglu, M. et al. Neural Comput & Applic (2018)