Revenue forecasting in smart retail based on customer clustering analysis

Understanding your customers is among one of the most important strategies to boost retail profit. In this research, we propose a WiFi-based sensing method to analyze customer behaviors. The monitoring of customer behaviors may lead to revenue growth. Specifically, the strategy is focused on understanding and grouping customers’ behaviors in which we track customers who share similar visiting patterns through WiFi sensing. Accordingly, we can have group-based prediction done for customers who own similar behaviors. We extract customers’ visiting patterns including the customers’ Service Set Identifier list and related information. After all, the proposed system is realized in a cafeteria place where we have the deployed WiFi access points continuously collect data over a time horizon of three months to serve as the inputs for data analysis. The data samples include the number of customers’ devices, number of products and revenue amounts. The dataset also integrates group information and weather conditions. We adopt several machine learning methods including Support Vector Regression and Random Forest for model induction. We conduct these models in terms of three main prediction tasks consisting of coffee shop’s revenue, the number of products, and the number of customers’ devices for evaluation. Furthermore, considering these predictions, we separate between the staying-in and to-go parts. Based on the experiment result, customers’ group information helps, as well as weather conditions. Overall, we can achieve the best prediction result when both the group information and weather conditions are included where we can enjoy as good as 6% to 10% in MAPE.