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Intent-Aware Sequential Recommendation for Small Retail: A Hybrid CatBoost-GRU Framework using Survey and Transaction Data
| International Journal of Computer Applications |
| Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
| Volume 187 - Number 140 |
| Year of Publication: 2026 |
| Authors: Md Zunaid Tausif, Rabeya Taposhi |
10.5120/ijca6ba017390304
|
Md Zunaid Tausif, Rabeya Taposhi . Intent-Aware Sequential Recommendation for Small Retail: A Hybrid CatBoost-GRU Framework using Survey and Transaction Data. International Journal of Computer Applications. 187, 140 ( Sep 2026), 15-25. DOI=10.5120/ijca6ba017390304
Abstract
Small physical retailers face a fundamental challenge: making personalized decisions with sparse, heterogeneous customer data. Unlike large e-commerce platforms, they lack the interaction volume required by conventional machine learning and recommendation systems. This paper proposes an intent-aware recommendation framework that jointly models customer purchase readiness and next-product preference using survey and transactional data from a micro-retail juice bar (Sundew Juicebar), supplemented with synthetically augmented records that preserve the original behavioral and demographic distributions. Purchase intent is formulated as a customer-level classification task, achieving a mean AUC of 0.801 under cross-validation, while next-item prediction is addressed using sequential and co-occurrence-based methods. The results show that classical recommendation techniques remain competitive in menu-constrained environments, while sequential models capture complementary behavioral patterns. By integrating intent prediction with recommendation through a weighted fusion mechanism, the proposed framework improves Accuracy@1 by 5.00% and NDCG@3 by 0.89% over a standalone sequential model. Beyond predictive performance, the framework provides interpretable decision support, enabling small-business operators to understand and act on model outputs. The results demonstrate that combining behavioral and attitudinal signals yields practical value in real-world micro-retail settings, even under severe data constraints.
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