Purchase Prediction in Free Online Games via Survival Analysis

In the free online game industry, in-game purchase prediction is an important research topic. On the one hand, knowing the players who are likely or unlikely to pay for the game can help the development of corresponding marketing strategies and incentives. On the other hand, the result of purchase prediction indicates the status of the game operation status and helps the game company allocate a reasonable amount of resources for the game. In this paper, we focus on predicting the purchase probability of paying players and finding important features. We consider two types of features related to players’ playing and purchase behaviors. Then, based on these features we proposed, we use two different models to predict the survival probability for players and analyze the feature importance.