Multi-task based Sales Predictions for Online Promotions

The e-commerce era is witnessing a rapid development of various annual online promotions, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Alibaba's 11.11, etc. Sales Predictions for Online Promotions (SPOP) are a set of sales related forecasts for the promotion day, including gross merchandise volume, sales volume, best selling products, etc. SPOP is highly important for e-commerce platforms to efficiently organize merchandise and maximize business values. However, sales patterns during the promotions are varied according to different scenarios, each model of which is designed with different features, static or dynamic, for one task in particular. Therefore, several models are proposed with part of features that are possibly beneficial to other tasks, which indicates the universal representation for the items needs to be learned across different promotion scenarios. To address this problem, this paper proposes aDeep ItemNetwork for Online Promotions (DINOP). In DINOP, we design a novel Target Users Controlled Gated Recurrent Unit (TUC-GRU) structure for dynamic features, and provide a new attention mechanism introducing static users profiles. In contrast to traditional prediction models, the network we proposed can effectively and efficiently learn universal item representation by incorporating users' properties as controllers. Furthermore, it can successfully discover the static and dynamic features guided by the multi-task learning, and is easily extended to other sales related prediction problems without retraining. Empirical results show that performance of DINOP in the real data set of Alibaba's Global Shopping Festival is superior to other state-of-the-arts practical methodologies in terms of the convergence rate and prediction accuracy.