Association Rules in Data Mining: An Application on a Clothing and Accessory Specialty Store

Abstract

Retailers provide important functions that increase the value of the products and services they sell to consumers. Retailers value creating functions are providing assortment of products and services: breaking bulk, holding inventory, and providing services. For a long time, retail store managers have been interested in learning about within and cross-category purchase behavior of their customers, since valuable insights for designing marketing and/or targeted cross-selling programs can be derived. Especially, parallel to the development of information processing and communication technologies, it has become possible to transfer customers shopping information into databases with the help of barcode technology. Data mining is the technique presenting significant and useful information using of lots of data. Association rule mining is realized by using market basket analysis to discover relationships among items purchased by customers in transaction databases. In this study, association rules were estimated by using market basket analysis and taking support, confidence and lift measures into consideration. In the process of analysis, by using of data belonging to the year of 2012 from a clothing and accessory specialty store operating in the province of Osmaniye, a set of data related to 42.390 sales transactions including 9.000 different product kinds in 35 different product categories (SKU) were used. Analyses were carried out with the help of SPSS Clementine packet program and hence 25.470 rules were determined