From Stars to Dogs: A Data Analytic Approach to Identifying “Out-Of-Favor” Products on E-Commerce Platforms
提出一种系统架构，利用历史评级和文本评论数据，通过LSTM模型预测未来评级趋势，再用二分类器识别可能“失宠”的产品，帮助电商平台主动剔除低质量商品。
Online retail platforms are increasingly challenged by the proliferation of low-quality products, which may damage their reputation and sales. To address this problem, we propose a system architecture to proactively identify products that are likely to go “out of favor.” Our approach uses historical data to extract useful information from customer ratings and textual reviews. Available data are fed into a state-of-the-art deep learning sequence model to forecast future ratings. We then analyze rating trends, extracting hyperparameters that a binary classifier uses to label products as “out-of-favor” or not. We tested this system on an Amazon dataset comprising nearly 800,000 observations across 2826 electronics products. Our results show that the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model excels in forecasting future product ratings compared to other benchmarks. Ablation analysis shows sentiment-related features significantly improve rating forecasts by up to 40%, with review topics adding 10% and other review characteristics, 4%. Counterintuitively, topic extraction from reviews does not provide substantial benefits, despite the heavy computational resources it requires. Finally, the two-stage classification process, which leverages time-series data and rating trends, offers a more stable and robust performance than conventional single-stage methods. We provide considerations for system architecture development through robustness checks ensuring its resilience to stressors. Our experiments indicate that rating trends can change in subtle ways over time, leading a promising “star” product to turn into a liability (“dog”). E-commerce platforms can use the proposed system architecture proactively to identify and remove potentially dubious products instead of waiting to take reactive action.