Retail market basket analysis: a quantitative modelling approach

Abstract

Market basket analysis is a generic term for methodologies that study the composition of a basket of products (i.e. a shopping basket) purchased by a household during a single shopping trip. The idea is that market baskets reflect interdependencies between products or purchases made in different product categories, and that these interdependencies can be useful to support retail marketing decisions. Recently, a number of advances in data mining (association rules) and statistics (mixture models) offer new opportunities to analyse such data. In this dissertation, the focus is therefore on the development and application of such techniques for two specific problems where product/category interdependencies play an important role, i.e. in product selection and in behaviour-based customer segmentation. ...