The predictability of consumer visitation patterns
We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is actually highly predictable. Notwithstanding a wide range of indivi...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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Nature Publishing Group
2014
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/88207 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8053-9983 |
| _version_ | 1826205350492110848 |
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| author | Llorente, Alejandro Cebrian, Manuel Moro, Esteban Krumme, Katherine Ann Pentland, Alex Paul |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Llorente, Alejandro Cebrian, Manuel Moro, Esteban Krumme, Katherine Ann Pentland, Alex Paul |
| author_sort | Llorente, Alejandro |
| collection | MIT |
| description | We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is actually highly predictable. Notwithstanding a wide range of individual preferences, shoppers share regularities in how they visit merchant locations over time. Yet while aggregate behavior is largely predictable, the interleaving of shopping events introduces important stochastic elements at short time scales. These short- and long-scale patterns suggest a theoretical upper bound on predictability, and describe the accuracy of a Markov model in predicting a person's next location. We incorporate population-level transition probabilities in the predictive models, and find that in many cases these improve accuracy. While our results point to the elusiveness of precise predictions about where a person will go next, they suggest the existence, at large time-scales, of regularities across the population. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:11:17Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/88207 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:11:17Z |
| publishDate | 2014 |
| publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/882072022-10-01T13:36:51Z The predictability of consumer visitation patterns Llorente, Alejandro Cebrian, Manuel Moro, Esteban Krumme, Katherine Ann Pentland, Alex Paul Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Krumme, Katherine Ann Pentland, Alex Paul We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is actually highly predictable. Notwithstanding a wide range of individual preferences, shoppers share regularities in how they visit merchant locations over time. Yet while aggregate behavior is largely predictable, the interleaving of shopping events introduces important stochastic elements at short time scales. These short- and long-scale patterns suggest a theoretical upper bound on predictability, and describe the accuracy of a Markov model in predicting a person's next location. We incorporate population-level transition probabilities in the predictive models, and find that in many cases these improve accuracy. While our results point to the elusiveness of precise predictions about where a person will go next, they suggest the existence, at large time-scales, of regularities across the population. 2014-07-08T18:54:16Z 2014-07-08T18:54:16Z 2013-04 2012-09 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 2045-2322 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/88207 Krumme, Coco, Alejandro Llorente, Manuel Cebrian, Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland, and Esteban Moro. “The Predictability of Consumer Visitation Patterns.” Sci. Rep. 3 (April 18, 2013). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8053-9983 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep01645 Scientific Reports Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ application/pdf Nature Publishing Group Nature Publishing Group |
| spellingShingle | Llorente, Alejandro Cebrian, Manuel Moro, Esteban Krumme, Katherine Ann Pentland, Alex Paul The predictability of consumer visitation patterns |
| title | The predictability of consumer visitation patterns |
| title_full | The predictability of consumer visitation patterns |
| title_fullStr | The predictability of consumer visitation patterns |
| title_full_unstemmed | The predictability of consumer visitation patterns |
| title_short | The predictability of consumer visitation patterns |
| title_sort | predictability of consumer visitation patterns |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/88207 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8053-9983 |
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