Discovering market basket patterns using hierarchical association rules

Abstract

Association rules are a data mining method for discovering patterns of frequent item sets, such as products in a store that are frequently purchased at the same time by a customer (market basket analysis). A number of interestingness measures for association rules have been developed to date, but research has shown that there a dominant measure does not exist. Authors have mostly used objective measures, whereas subjective measures have rarely been investigated. This paper aims to combine objective measures such as support, confidence and lift with a subjective approach based on human expert selection in order to extract interesting rules from a real dataset collected from a large Croatian retail chain. Hierarchical association rules were used to enhance the efficiency of the extraction rule. The results show that rules that are more interesting were extracted using the hierarchical method, and that a hybrid approach of combining objective and subjective measures succeeds in extracting certain unexpected and actionable rules. The research can be useful for retail and marketing managers in planning marketing strategies, as well as for researchers investigating this field.