Forecasting E-Commerce Adoption Based on Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks

E-commerce refers to a system that allows individuals to purchase and sell things online. The primary goal of e-commerce is to offer customers the convenience of not going to a physical store to make a purchase. They will purchase the item online and have it delivered to their home within a few days. The goal of this research was to develop machine learning algorithms that might predict e-commerce platform sales. A case study has been designed in this paper based on a proposed continuous Stochastic Fractal Search (SFS) based on a Guided Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) to optimize the parameter weights of the Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (BRNN). Furthermore, a time series dataset is tested in the experiments of e-commerce demand forecasting. Finally, the results were compared to many versions of the state-of-the-art optimization techniques such as the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), and Genetic Algorithm (GA). A statistical analysis has proven that the proposed algorithm can work significantly better by statistical analysis test at the P-value less than 0.05 with a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test applied to confirm the performance of the proposed ensemble model. The proposed Algorithm achieved a root mean square error of RMSE (0.0000359), Mean (0.00003593) and Standard Deviation (0.000002162).