RecSys 2015 Challenge

RecSys Challenge 2015 Homepage

Given a sequence of click events performed by some user during a typical session in an e-commerce website, the goal is to predict whether the user is going to buy something or not, and if he is buying, what would be the items he is going to buy. The task could therefore be divided into two sub goals:

Is the user going to buy items in this session? Yes|No

If yes, what are the items that are going to be bought?

I have mentored a Ph.D. student who started the competition about a week before the deadline. We ranked 44th out of 567 teams (team name Cuda). This isn't too bad for taking on a 10-month competition for a week.

Approach

We used hashing tricks together with XGBoost.

Code

Data Preparation
Feature Preparation
XGBoost Learning
Prediction