Customers’ Behavior Prediction Using Artificial Neural Network

In this paper, customer restaurant preference is predicted based on social media location check-ins. Historical preferences of the customer and the influence of the customer’s social network are used in combination with the customer’s mobility characteristics as inputs to the model. As the popularity of social media increases, more and more customer comments and feedback about products and services are available online. It not only becomes a way of sharing information among friends in the social network but also forms a new type of survey which can be utilized by business companies to improve their existing products, services, and market analysis. Approximately 121,000 foursquare restaurant check-ins in the Greater New York City area are used in this research. Artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) are developed to predict the customers’ behavior regarding restaurant preferences. ANN provides 93.13% average accuracy across investigated customers, compared to only 54.00% for SVM with a sigmoid kernel function.