Purchase Influence Mining: Identifying Top-k Items Attracting Purchase of Target Item

Web logs in e-commerce sites consist of user actions on items such as visiting an item description page, adding an item to a wishlist, and purchasing an item. Those items could be represented as nodes in a graph while viewing their relationships as edges according to the user actions. Based on the item graph, identifying items that attract users to purchase the target item could be practically used for supporting business decisions. To do this, we introduce a new task, called 'Purchase Influence Mining', that finds the top-k items (PIM-items) maximizing the estimated purchase influence from them to a target item. We solve this problem by modeling the purchase influence as the shortest path between item pair. According to the result, our approach more consistently finds the k PIM-items than the baseline.