Chapter 8. Finding Patterns – Market Basket Analysis Using Association Rules

Think back to your last impulse purchase. Maybe in the grocery store checkout lane you bought a pack of chewing gum or a candy bar. Perhaps on a late-night trip for diapers and formula you picked up a caffeinated beverage or a six-pack of beer. You might have even bought this book on a bookseller's recommendation. These impulse buys are no coincidence, as retailers use sophisticated data analysis techniques to identify patterns that will drive retail behavior.

In years past, such recommendations were based on the subjective intuition of marketing professionals and inventory managers. Now, barcode scanners, inventory databases, and online shopping carts have generated transactional data that machine learning can use to learn purchasing patterns. The practice is commonly known as market basket analysis due to the fact that it has been so frequently applied to supermarket data.

Although the...