Application of artificial neural network in market segmentation: A review on recent trends

Despite the significance of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithm to market segmentation, there is a need of a comprehensive literature review and a classification system for it towards identification of future trend of market segmentation research. The present work is the first identifiable academic literature review of the application of neural network based techniques to segmentation. Our study has provided an academic database of literature between the periods of 2000-2010 and proposed a classification scheme for the articles. One thousands (1000) articles have been identified, and around 100 relevant selected articles have been subsequently reviewed and classified based on the major focus of each paper. Findings of this study indicated that the research area of ANN based applications are receiving most research attention and self organizing map based applications are second in position to be used in segmentation. The commonly used models for market segmentation are data mining, intelligent system etc. Our analysis furnishes a roadmap to guide future research and aid knowledge accretion and establishment pertaining to the application of ANN based techniques in market segmentation. Thus the present work will significantly contribute to both the industry and academic research in business and marketing as a sustainable valuable knowledge source of market segmentation with the future trend of ANN application in segmentation.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures,3 Table

Meta-heuristics in cellular manufacturing: A state-of-the-art review

Meta-heuristic approaches are general algorithmic framework, often nature-inspired and designed to solve NP-complete optimization problems in cellular manufacturing systems and has been a growing research area for the past two decades. This paper discusses various meta-heuristic techniques such as evolutionary approach, Ant colony optimization, simulated annealing, Tabu search and other recent approaches, and their applications to the vicinity of group technology/cell formation (GT/CF) problem in cellular manufacturing. The nobility of this paper is to incorporate various prevailing issues, open problems of meta-heuristic approaches, its usage, comparison, hybridization and its scope of future research in the aforesaid area

Machine-Part cell formation through visual decipherable clustering of Self Organizing Map

Machine-part cell formation is used in cellular manufacturing in order to process a large variety, quality, lower work in process levels, reducing manufacturing lead-time and customer response time while retaining flexibility for new products. This paper presents a new and novel approach for obtaining machine cells and part families. In the cellular manufacturing the fundamental problem is the formation of part families and machine cells. The present paper deals with the Self Organising Map (SOM) method an unsupervised learning algorithm in Artificial Intelligence, and has been used as a visually decipherable clustering tool of machine-part cell formation. The objective of the paper is to cluster the binary machine-part matrix through visually decipherable cluster of SOM color-coding and labelling via the SOM map nodes in such a way that the part families are processed in that machine cells. The Umatrix, component plane, principal component projection, scatter plot and histogram of SOM have been reported in the present work for the successful visualization of the machine-part cell formation. Computational result with the proposed algorithm on a set of group technology problems available in the literature is also presented. The proposed SOM approach produced solutions with a grouping efficacy that is at least as good as any results earlier reported in the literature and improved the grouping efficacy for 70% of the problems and found immensely useful to both industry practitioners and researchers.Comment: 18 pages,3 table, 4 figure

Implementing Data Strategy: Design Considerations and Reference Architecture for Data-Enabled Value Creation

With the arrival of Big Data, organizations have started building data-enabled customer value propositions to increase monetizing and cost-saving opportunities. Organizations have to implement a set of guidelines, procedures, and processes to manage, process and transform data that could be leveraged for value creation. This study has approached the journey of an organization towards data-enabled value creation through four levels of data processing, such as data extraction, data transformation, value creation, and value delivery. This study has critical inferences on using data management solutions such as RDBMS, NoSQL, NewSQL, Big Data and real-time reporting tools to support transactional data in internal systems, and other types of data in external systems such as Social Media. The outcome of this study is a methodological technology independent data management framework an organization could use when building a strategy around data. This study provides guidelines for defining an enterprise-wide data management solution, helping both the academicians and practitioners

Hybrid principal component analysis technique to machine-part grouping problem in cellular manufacturing system

This article portrays a hybrid principal component analysis (PCA)-based technique to construct production cells in cellular manufacturing system (CMS). The key problem in CMS is to recognise the machine cells and corresponding part families and subsequently the formation of production cells. A novel approach is considered in this study to systematise a hybrid multivariate clustering technique based on covariance analysis to form the machine cells in CMS. The intended technique is demonstrated in three segments. Firstly, a similarity matrix is developed by exploiting the covariance analysis procedure. In the second stage, the PCA is utilised to identify the potential clusters in CMS with the assistance of eigenvalue and eigenvector computation. In the last stage, an adjustment heuristic is adopted to improve the solution quality and consequently the clustering efficiency. This article states that, the addition of the adjustment heuristic approach into a traditional multivariate PCA-based clustering technique not only enhances the solution quality significantly, but also downgrades the inconsistency of the solutions achieved. The hybrid technique is tested on 24 test datasets available in published articles and it is shown to outperform other published methodologies by enhancing the solution quality on the test problems