fbt-walkthrough

Frequently bought together

In this example, we’ll walk through building a ‘Frequently bought together’ feature to show in a mobile e-commerce app.

Mockup

When a user views a ‘Simple Plant’ in our e-commerce app, we want to promote a set of products to encourage the user to spend more and hence increase the transaction value.

Therefore, the model that we’d like to build is:

Given a product listing, a set of frequently bought together products and a specific user, predict the transaction value.

Let’s say that we’re looking for the following features to train our initial model:

1. The product listing (product_primary)

2. Frequently bought together products (fbt_1, fbt_2, fbt_3)

3. Sessions in the past week (session_index)

4. Days since install (days_since_install)

5. User’s age (age)

6. User’s gender (gender)

7. User’s country (country)

8. User’s spend so far (spend_to_date)

and we will predict

1. User's spend in the current session (transaction_value_this_session)

Once we’ve trained and deployed the model, we query it with the model features and it returns a prediction for the transaction value in this session.

Model query overview

Doing it this way allows us to query the model multiple times with different fbt_* products, and use the ones that result in the highest transaction_value_this_session.

Model query option1

Model query option1

The model predicts a higher transaction_value_this_session for simple_plant, complex_plant and plant_food, so we’ll show that to the user instead of simple_plant, pot and watering_can.

Raw data

We're assuming that we have the following raw data. These events are based on the Firebase SDK.

Session start event

[
{
"event_name": "session_start",
"session_id": "72a039b9-6759-901a-cf3a-3354d21beed2",
"start_time": "2018-01-14T17:53:57",
"appInstanceId": "72a039b9-6759-901a-cf3a-3354d21beed2",
"age": "25-34",
"app_Store": "iTunes",
"app_Version": "3.4.2",
"country": "BR",
"device_brand": "Apple",
"device_category": "tablet",
"device_model": "iPad Pro",
"first_open_time": "2017-12-02T23:00:00",
"gender": "male",
"interests": "arts & entertainment, games",
"language": "pt-br",
"new/established": "established",
"os_version": "10.1"
}
]

Product page is viewed

[
{
"event_name": "view_item",
"appInstanceId": "72a039b9-6759-901a-cf3a-3354d21beed2",
"session_id": "72a039b9-6759-901a-cf3a-3354d21beed2",
"item_id": "32",
"item_name": "simple_plant",
"item_category": "plants"
}
]

Purchase

[
{
"event_name": "ecommerce_purchase",
"appInstanceId": "72a039b9-6759-901a-cf3a-3354d21beed2",
"session_id": "72a039b9-6759-901a-cf3a-3354d21beed2"’
"item_id": "32, 42, 94",
"currency": "usd",
"value": "12, 23, 5"
}
]

Transforming data

To train the model, we are looking for data to be organized like this.

Unique user_id (appInstanceId)	product_primary	fbt_1	fbt_2	fbt_3	session_index	days_since_install	age	gender	country	spend_to_date	transaction_value_this_session

Since user may not buy everything in one transaction, fbt_1, fbt_2, fbt_3 are the top 3 products bought by the user in a 48 hour window (+- 24 hours) from the product_primary

Anchor

Streaming BTS

Window BTS