Forecasting E-Commerce Adoption Based on Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks

E-commerce refers to a system that allows individuals to purchase and sell things online. The primary goal of e-commerce is to offer customers the convenience of not going to a physical store to make a purchase. They will purchase the item online and have it delivered to their home within a few days. The goal of this research was to develop machine learning algorithms that might predict e-commerce platform sales. A case study has been designed in this paper based on a proposed continuous Stochastic Fractal Search (SFS) based on a Guided Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) to optimize the parameter weights of the Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (BRNN). Furthermore, a time series dataset is tested in the experiments of e-commerce demand forecasting. Finally, the results were compared to many versions of the state-of-the-art optimization techniques such as the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), and Genetic Algorithm (GA). A statistical analysis has proven that the proposed algorithm can work significantly better by statistical analysis test at the P-value less than 0.05 with a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test applied to confirm the performance of the proposed ensemble model. The proposed Algorithm achieved a root mean square error of RMSE (0.0000359), Mean (0.00003593) and Standard Deviation (0.000002162).

Automated summary

E-commerce is a system that allows individuals to purchase and sell goods online, aiming to provide convenience to customers by eliminating the need to visit physical stores. This research aims to develop machine learning algorithms for predicting e-commerce sales and tests the proposed algorithm on a time series dataset.