DATA MINING: A SEGMENTATION ANALYSIS OF U.S. GROCERY SHOPPERS

Consumers make choices about where to shop based on their preferences for a shopping environment and experience as well as the selection of products at a particular store. This study illustrates how retail firms and marketing analysts can utilize data mining techniques to better understand customer profiles and behavior. Among the key areas where data mining can produce new knowledge is the segmentation of customer data bases according to demographics, buying patterns, geographics, attitudes, and other variables. This paper builds profiles of grocery shoppers based on their preferences for 33 retail grocery store characteristics. The data are from a representative, nationwide sample of 900 supermarket shoppers collected in 1999. Six customer profiles are found to exist, including (1) "Time Pressed Meat Eaters", (2) "Back to Nature Shoppers", (3) "Discriminating Leisure Shoppers", (4) "No Nonsense Shoppers", (5) "The One Stop Socialites", and (6) "Middle of the Road Shoppers". Each of the customer profiles is described with respect to the underlying demographics and income. Consumer shopping segments cut across most demographic groups but are somewhat correlated with income. Hierarchical lists of preferences reveal that low price is not among the top five most important store characteristics. Experience and preferences for internet shopping shows that of the 44% who have access to the internet, only 3% had used it to order food.Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Modeling toothpaste brand choice: An empirical comparison of artificial neural networks and multinomial probit model

Copyright @ 2010 Atlantis PressThe purpose of this study is to compare the performances of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Multinomial Probit (MNP) approaches in modeling the choice decision within fast moving consumer goods sector. To do this, based on 2597 toothpaste purchases of a panel sample of 404 households, choice models are built and their performances are compared on the 861 purchases of a test sample of 135 households. Results show that ANN's predictions are better while MNP is useful in providing marketing insight

A Quantitative Evaluation of Global, Rule-Based Explanations of Post-Hoc, Model Agnostic Methods

Understanding the inferences of data-driven, machine-learned models can be seen as a process that discloses the relationships between their input and output. These relationships consist and can be represented as a set of inference rules. However, the models usually do not explicit these rules to their end-users who, subsequently, perceive them as black-boxes and might not trust their predictions. Therefore, scholars have proposed several methods for extracting rules from data-driven machine-learned models to explain their logic. However, limited work exists on the evaluation and comparison of these methods. This study proposes a novel comparative approach to evaluate and compare the rulesets produced by five model-agnostic, post-hoc rule extractors by employing eight quantitative metrics. Eventually, the Friedman test was employed to check whether a method consistently performed better than the others, in terms of the selected metrics, and could be considered superior. Findings demonstrate that these metrics do not provide sufficient evidence to identify superior methods over the others. However, when used together, these metrics form a tool, applicable to every rule-extraction method and machine-learned models, that is, suitable to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the rule-extractors in various applications in an objective and straightforward manner, without any human interventions. Thus, they are capable of successfully modelling distinctively aspects of explainability, providing to researchers and practitioners vital insights on what a model has learned during its training process and how it makes its predictions

A Survey On Data Mining Techniques and Applications

Data Mining refers to the analysis of experimental data sets to seek out relationships and to summarize the data in ways in which are each comprehensible and helpful. Compared with alternative DM techniques, Intelligent Systems (ISs) based mostly approaches that embody Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), fuzzy pure mathematics, approximate reasoning, and derivative-free optimisation strategies similar to Genetic Algorithms (GAs), are tolerant of impreciseness, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation. This paper reviews varieties of Data Mining techniques and applications

Adaptive Multi-level Backward Tracking for Sequential Feature Selection

In the past few decades, the large amount of available data has become a major challenge in data mining and machine learning. Feature selection is a significant preprocessing step for selecting the most informative features by removing irrelevant and redundant features, especially for large datasets. These selected features play an important role in information searching and enhancing the performance of machine learning models. In this research, we propose a new technique called One-level Forward Multi-level Backward Selection (OFMB). The proposed algorithm consists of two phases. The first phase aims to create preliminarily selected subsets. The second phase provides an improvement on the previous result by an adaptive multi-level backward searching technique. Hence, the idea is to apply an improvement step during the feature addition and an adaptive search method on the backtracking step. We have tested our algorithm on twelve standard UCI datasets based on k-nearest neighbor and naive Bayes classifiers. Their accuracy was then compared with some popular methods. OFMB showed better results than the other sequential forward searching techniques for most of the tested datasets