Proactive Return Prediction in Online Fashion Retail Using Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

Online fashion retailers face enormous challenges due to high return rates that significantly affect their operational performance. Proactively predicting returns at the point of order placement allows for preemptive interventions to reduce potentially problematic transactions. We propose an innovative inductive Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network tailored for proactive return prediction within the realm of online fashion retail. Our model intricately encapsulates customer preferences, product attributes, and order characteristics, providing a holistic approach to return prediction. Through evaluation using real-world data sourced from an online fashion retail platform, our methodology demonstrates superior predictive accuracy on the return behavior of repeat customers, compared to conventional machine learning techniques. Furthermore, through ablation analysis, we underscore the importance of simultaneously capturing customer, order, and product characteristics for an effective proactive return prediction model.