Publications

The Role of Unattributed Behavior Logs in Predictive User Segmentation

ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)

Publication date: October 21, 2023

Atanu R Sinha, Harshita Chopra, Aurghya Maiti, Atishay Ganesh, Sarthak Kapoor, Saili Myana, Saurabh Mahapatra

Online browsing on firms' sites generates user behavior logs (or, logs). These logs are mainstays that drive several user modeling tasks. The logs that inform user modeling are the ones that are attributed to each user, termed Attributed Behaviors (AB). But, a lot more logs are anonymous, upwards of 85\%. For example, many users do not sign in while browsing. These logs are not attributed to users, termed Unattributed Behaviors (UB), and are not recognized in user modeling. We examine whether and how UB can benefit user modeling. We focus on a common task, that of user segmentation, for which the prior art uses only AB. We demonstrate that information from UBs, although unattributed to any individual, when used along with ABs, enriches performance of machine learning model for user segmentation. We perform predictive segmentation, whereby predicted outcomes for each segment are evaluated against actual outcomes. Multiple evaluations on two datasets, one of which is public, relative to state of the art baseline, show strong performance of our model in predicting outcomes and in reducing user segmentation error.

Learn More