Application of machine learning in predicting consumer behavior and precision marketing

Jin Lin

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 5, 1-12

Abstract: with the intensification of market competition and the complexity of consumer behavior, enterprises are faced with the challenge of how to accurately identify potential customers and improve user conversion rate. This paper aims to study the application of machine learning in consumer behavior prediction and precision marketing. Four models, namely support vector machine (SVM), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), categorical boosting (CatBoost), and backpropagation artificial neural network (BPANN), are mainly used to predict consumers’ purchase intention, and the performance of these models in different scenarios is verified through experiments. The results show that CatBoost and XGBoost have the best prediction results when dealing with complex features and large-scale data, F1 scores are 0.93 and 0.92 respectively, and CatBoost’s ROC AUC reaches the highest value of 0.985. while SVM has an advantage in accuracy rate, but slightly underperformance when dealing with large-scale data. Through feature importance analysis, we identify the significant impact of page views, residence time and other features on purchasing behavior. Based on the model prediction results, this paper proposes the specific application of optimization marketing strategies such as recommendation system, dynamic pricing and personalized advertising. Future research could improve the predictive power of the model by introducing more kinds of unstructured data, such as consumer reviews, images, videos, and social media data. In addition, the use of deep learning models, such as Transformers or Self-Attention Mechanisms, can better capture complex patterns in long time series data.

Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0321854

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0321854

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