BG/NBD Model

The BG/NBD (Beta-Geometric/Negative Binomial Distribution) model is a probabilistic buy-till-you-die model that predicts how many times a customer will transact in the future and whether that customer is still active, using only their past purchase recency and frequency. Introduced by Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie and Ka Lok Lee in their 2005 Marketing Science paper "Counting Your Customers the Easy Way," it was designed as a far simpler alternative to the Pareto/NBD model of Schmittlein, Morrison and Colombo while delivering comparable forecasts. The model couples a Poisson purchasing process, whose rate varies across customers by a gamma distribution, with a geometric dropout process governed by a beta-distributed dropout probability. The key behavioral story is that customers buy at a steady individual rate while alive and become permanently inactive with some probability immediately after any purchase. Because the latent attrition is unobserved, the model infers each customer's probability of still being alive from how recently and how often they bought. Its estimation requires only the (x, t_x, T) summary per customer and can even be fit in a spreadsheet, which made customer-base analysis practical for ordinary analysts.