Due to the complexity of the e-commerce system, a hybrid model for onlinepurchasing behavior forecasting is developed to predict whether or not a customer makes a purchase during the next visit to the online store based on the previous behaviors, i.e., online-purchasing behavior. The proposed model makes contributions to literature from two perspectives: (1) a classification model is proposed based on the "hybrid modeling" concept, in which an effective artificial intelligence (AI) technique of support vector machine (SVM) is employed for classification forecasting and further extended by introducing the promising AI optimization tool of firefly algorithm (FA), to solve the crucial but tough task of parameters selection, i.e., the FA-based SVM model; (2) an appropriate predictor set is carefully designed especially considering online shopping cart use which was otherwise neglected in existing models, apart from other common online behaviors, e.g., clickstream behavior, previous purchase behavior and customer heterogeneity. To verify the superiority of the proposed model, an online furniture store is focused on as study sample, and the empirical results statistically support that the proposed FA-based SVM model considering online shopping cart use significantly beat all benchmarking models (with other popular classification methods and/or different predictor sets) in terms of prediction accuracy.
With the rapid development of the Internet and big data technologies, a rich of online data (including news releases) can helpfully facilitate forecasting oil price trends. Accordingly, this study introduces sentiment analysis, a useful big data analysis tool, to understand the relevant information of online news articles and formulate an oil price trend prediction method with sentiment. Three main steps are included in the proposed method, i.e., sentiment analysis, relationship investigation and trend prediction. In sentiment analysis, the sentiment (or tone) is extracted based on a dictionary-based approach to capture the relevant online information concerning oil markets and the driving factors. In relationship investigation, the Granger causality analysis is conducted to explore whether and how the sentiment impacts oil price. In trend prediction, the sentiment is used as an important independent variable, and some popular forecasting models, e.g., logistic regression, support vector machine, decision tree and back propagation neural network, are performed. With crude oil futures prices of the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and news articles of the Thomson Reuters as studying samples, the empirical results statistically support the powerful predictive power of sentiment for oil price trends and hence the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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