A machine-learning approach for classifying Indian internet shoppers

Abstract

This paper identifies the key factors that influence Indian consumers to shop online. The study uses data collected via questionnaire survey to segment consumers with shared behaviours into groups, with the results of this clustering used to train radial basis function neural networks, decision trees and random forest models. The performance of these classification models is then assessed and compared with the conventional statistical-based naïve Bayes method and logistic regression. The study finds that the random forest method provides the greatest accuracy for the segmentation of online consumers, followed by naïve Bayes and decision trees methods. The behavioural patterns identified in this study may be leveraged in real-world situations.