Providing accurate estimated time of package delivery on users' purchasing
pages for e-commerce platforms is of great importance to their purchasing
decisions and post-purchase experiences. Although this problem shares some
common issues with the conventional estimated time of arrival (ETA), it is more
challenging with the following aspects: 1) Inductive inference. Models are
required to predict ETA for orders with unseen retailers and addresses; 2)
High-order interaction of order semantic information. Apart from the
spatio-temporal features, the estimated time also varies greatly with other
factors, such as the packaging efficiency of retailers, as well as the
high-order interaction of these factors. In this paper, we propose an inductive
graph transformer (IGT) that leverages raw feature information and structural
graph data to estimate package delivery time. Different from previous graph
transformer architectures, IGT adopts a decoupled pipeline and trains
transformer as a regression function that can capture the multiplex information
from both raw feature and dense embeddings encoded by a graph neural network
(GNN). In addition, we further simplify the GNN structure by removing its
non-linear activation and the learnable linear transformation matrix. The
reduced parameter search space and linear information propagation in the
simplified GNN enable the IGT to be applied in large-scale industrial
scenarios. Experiments on real-world logistics datasets show that our proposed
model can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods on estimation
of delivery time. The source code is available at:
this https URL

本文提出一种基于归纳图转换器（IGT）的回归函数方法，通过原始特征信息与结构图数据进行参数训练，以预估出物流包裹的交付时间，实验结果表明该方法可以显著提高交付时间的估计精度。