如果我们必须在python中预测客户的下一个支出类别，那是什么样的机器学习问题？

Question

I have a data set of shape -> (6210782, 5) .

This has 200,000 unique customers and their transactions at different different outlets. Time Series is little over an year.

df.head()

customer_id TransactionDate TransationTime  Amount  OutletCategory
514         22-04-2015      19:42:18        9445    M16
514         23-04-2015      16:29:28        2000    M23
514         02-05-2015      15:17:55        1398    M16
514         27-06-2015      13:51:29        1995    M7
514         07-08-2015      17:31:30        2000    M23

What Kind of Machine Learning Problem it is and what should be the approach and algorithm used in solving following tasks:

1) predict customers Next Transaction category ? (I am thinking of this as multinomial classification)

2) predict customers Next Transaction category in next 6 hrs ?

3) predict customers Next Transaction Amount ? (Is this an LSTM task)

4) predict customers Next Transaction Amount in next 6 hrs ?

As we have 200,000 unique customers how should I prepare the data if I have to predict the next transaction amount ? Should I pivot the customers to columns???

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Data/ Time Series Exploration that may help visualize the data:

Below is the Transactions Amount wrt to categories over the time series chart:

For below charts: I have created a small data set of "Datetime" as index and "Amount" column to understand the transnational behavior wrt to time.

Amount Spend to Transaction Dates chart:

Amount Spend to Weekly TransactionDates chart:

Mean of Amount spend in a day(hourly)

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Expectations: I am new to Data Science and Python so just looking for right steps to proceed with the task (will manage the code myself)

Answer 1

There will be never the exactly right answer to this kind of problem.

To your problems:

Everything related to 6 hours seems like to be a Timeseries problem. The works eg with Arima-Models.

3) Is a Regression, you basically have to predict a amount which has a wide range of possibilities. The starting point could be a linear-regression. But there are also other algorithms for that

1) Should be a multiclass problem, for this you could use a decision tree eg

In general:

To give you more ideas: Scikit-Learn https://scikit-learn.org/stable/ can be a good starting point for you.