On applying Neuro - Computing in E-com Domain
This work addresses the practical usefulness of neural networks for e-commerce behavior prediction, showing incremental findings that question their superiority over simpler models.
The paper compared three neural networks to logistic regression models for predicting consumer e-commerce adoption, finding that ANNs were slightly more accurate but not justifiably so given their added complexity, and noted that ANNs' adaptability with small samples and many hidden nodes limits generalizability.
Prior studies have generally suggested that Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are superior to conventional statistical models in predicting consumer buying behavior. There are, however, contradicting findings which raise question over usefulness of ANNs. This paper discusses development of three neural networks for modeling consumer e-commerce behavior and compares the findings to equivalent logistic regression models. The results showed that ANNs predict e-commerce adoption slightly more accurately than logistic models but this is hardly justifiable given the added complexity. Further, ANNs seem to be highly adaptive, particularly when a small sample is coupled with a large number of nodes in hidden layers which, in turn, limits the neural networks' generalisability.