Predicting e-commerce customer conversion from minimal temporal patterns on symbolized clickstream trajectories

Knowing if a user is a buyer or window shopper solely based on clickstream data is of crucial importance for e-commerce platforms seeking to implement real-time accurate NBA (next best action) policies. However, due to the low frequency of conversion events and the noisiness of browsing data, classifying user sessions is very challenging. In this paper, we address the clickstream classification problem in the eCommerce industry and present three major contributions to the burgeoning field of AI-for-retail: first, we collected, normalized and prepared a novel dataset of live shopping sessions from a major European e-commerce website; second, we use the dataset to test in a controlled environment strong baselines and SOTA models from the literature; finally, we propose a new discriminative neural model that outperforms neural architectures recently proposed at Rakuten labs.