Micro Behaviors: A New Perspe ctive in E-commerce
Recommender Systems
Meizi Zhou
∗
University of Minnesota
zhou0793@umn.edu
Zhuoye Ding
Data Science Lab, JD.com
dingzhuoye@jd.com
Jiliang Tang
Michigan State University
tangjili@msu.edu
Dawei Yin
†
Data Science Lab, JD.com
yindawei@acm.org
ABSTRACT
The explosive popularity of e-commerce sites has reshaped users’
shopping habits and an increasing number of users prefer to spend
more time shopping online. This evolution allows e-commerce sites
to observe rich data about users. The majority of traditional recom-
mender systems have focused on the macro interactions between
users and items, i.e., the purchase history of a customer. However,
within each macro interaction between a user and an item, the user
actually performs a sequence of micro behaviors, which indicate
how the user locates the item, what activities the user conducts
on the item (e.g., reading the comments, carting, and ordering)
and how long the user stays with the item. Such micro behaviors
oer ne-grained and deep understandings about users and pro-
vide tremendous opportunities to advance recommender systems
in e-commerce. However, exploiting micro behaviors for recom-
mendations is rather limited, which motivates us to investigate e-
commerce recommendations from a micro-behavior perspective in
this paper. Particularly, we uncover the eects of micro behaviors on
recommendations and propose an interpretable
R
ecommendation
framework RIB, which models inherently the sequence of m
I
cro
B
ehaviors and their eects. Experimental results on datasets from a
real e-commence site demonstrate the eectiveness of the proposed
framework and the importance of micro behaviors for recommen-
dations.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Information systems → Summarization;
KEYWORDS
Micro behaviors, RNN, attention mechanism, e-commerce, recom-
mendation
∗
This work was done, when the author was an internship at Data Science Lab of
JD.com.
†
Corresponding author
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WSDM 2018, February 5–9, 2018, Marina Del Rey, CA, USA
© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5581-0/18/02.. . $15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3159652.3159671
ACM Reference Format:
Meizi Zhou, Zhuoye Ding, Jiliang Tang, and Dawei Yin. 2018. Micro Be-
haviors: A New Perspective in E-commerce Recommender Systems. In
Proceedings of WSDM 2018: The Eleventh ACM International Conference on
Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2018). ACM, New York, NY, USA,
9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3159652.3159671
1 INTRODUCTION
The modern e-commerce sites such as Amazon
1
and eBay
2
oer
hundreds of millions of products for sale. For example, as on June
20th, 2017, Amazon has more than 372 million products
3
. It has
become increasingly challenging for consumers to nd their inter-
ested items. Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating
this information overload problem by suggesting products that
have potentials to t consumers’ needs. They have been proven to
not only help increase customer satisfaction and create customer
loyalty [
34
] but also boost many aspects of e-commerce services
such as revenue and growth [24].
Meanwhile, the popularity of e-commerce sites has reshaped
users’ shopping habits and users prefer to spend more time shop-
ping online. For example, on average, American parents spend 7
hours per week on e-commerce sites
4
. This evolution enables e-
commerce sites to observe rich data about their users. Figure 1
illustrates a real example of observed data on a user from an e-
commerce site in a short period. The user rst enters a page of
iPhone 7 from searching result page. She reads the detailed descrip-
tion, as well as others’ comments and adds it to the cart. Then she
shifts to a page of iPhone 6 from the searching result page and reads
the comments. After that, she browses a page of iPhone 7 cases
from the sale page and orders the case. Finally, she jumps to a page
of Samsung Galaxy from the home page of the e-commerce site.
From a macro perspective as shown in the top subgure in Figure 1,
the user interacted with iPhone 7, iPhone 6, iPhone 7 cases and
Samsung Galaxy. While from a micro perspective as shown in the
bottom subgure, each macro interaction includes a sequence of
behaviors that can indicate how the user located the product page
(e.g., the search engine or the sale promotion), whether the user
clicks detailed information about a product (e.g., comments, or spec-
ications), whether a user carts or orders a product, and how long
the user dwells on a product. In this work, we refer these behaviors
1
https://www.amazon.com/
2
https://www.ebay.com/
3
https://www.scrapehero.com/number-of-products-sold-on-amazon-com-june-2017/
4
https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/ecommerce-trends/#cmtoc_anchor_id_0
WSDM’18, February 5-9, 2018, Marina Del Rey, CA, USA