Market basket analysis

Market basket analysis consists of some modeling techniques which are typically used by retailers and e-commerce marketplaces to analyze shopping carts and transactions to find out what customers buy the most, what kind of items they buy, what the peak season is for specific items to be sold the most, and so on. We will be focusing on item based transactional patterns in this chapter for detecting and predicting what items people are buying and are most likely to buy. Let us first look at the formal definition of market basket analysis and then we will look at core concepts, metrics, and techniques tied to it. Finally, we will conclude with how to actually use these results to make data driven decisions.

What does market basket analysis actually mean?

Market basket analysis typically encompasses several modeling techniques based upon the simple principle that while shopping if you buy a certain group of items (also known as an itemset in machine learning lingo), you...