用强化学习模拟顾客动线,更准且低成本。
Modelling Customer Trajectories with Reinforcement Learning for Practical Retail Insights

- 将顾客动线建模为最大熵强化学习问题,兼顾理性与随机性。
- 生成轨迹与真实数据偏差仅28%,优于传统启发式方法。
- 适合想低成本优化店铺布局的零售从业者。
理解顾客在零售空间中的移动路径对优化门店布局至关重要。真实轨迹数据虽准确,但采集成本高,多数零售商难以实现。现有廉价近似方法如旅行商问题(TSP)和概率最近邻(PNN)存在明显偏差,顾客实际路径平均偏离最短路径28%。本文提出基于智能体的建模框架,将顾客动线预测建模为最大熵强化学习问题,平衡奖励最大化与行为随机性,更贴合顾客有限理性。利用一家便利店的真实轨迹数据验证,该方法生成的轨迹比TSP和PNN更贴近真实行为,能更准确估计冲动购买率与货架流量密度。更重要的是,仅基于强化学习的预测能生成与真实数据一致的冲动商品重排决策,带来相当的利润增益。本研究证明强化学习可作为连接简化启发式与数据密集型方法的实用桥梁,使精准布局优化更易普及。代码已开源以促进后续研究。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Understanding customer movement within retail spaces is essential for optimizing store layouts. Real-world trajectory data can provide highly accurate insights, but collecting it is costly and often infeasible for many retailers. Heuristics such as Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Probabilistic Nearest Neighbours (PNN) are commonly used as inexpensive approximations, but actual customer trajectories deviate by an average of 28% from shortest paths, highlighting a tradeoff between accuracy and practicality. We propose an agent-based modelling framework that casts customer trajectory prediction as a maximum entropy reinforcement learning (RL) problem, balancing reward maximization with stochasticity to better reflect customers with bounded rationality. Using real-world trajectory data from a convenience store, we show that RL-generated trajectories align more closely with customer behaviour than TSP and PNN, providing more accurate estimates of impulse purchase rates and shelf traffic densities. Furthermore, only RL-based predictions yield repositioning decisions for impulse products that align with those derived from actual trajectory data, resulting in comparable estimated profit gains. Our work demonstrates that RL provides a practical, behaviourally grounded alternative that bridges the gap between oversimplified heuristics and data-intensive approaches, making accurate layout optimization more accessible. To encourage further research, the source code is available on GitHub.
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