Since the introduction of electronic points of sale, retailers have been collecting an incredible amount of data. To leverage this data in to produce business value, they first developed a way to consolidate and aggregate the data to understand the basics of the business.
Recently, the focus shifted to the lowest level of granularity—the market basket transaction. At this level of detail, the retailers have direct visibility into the market basket of each customer who shopped at their store, understanding not only the quantity of the purchased items in that particular basket, but also how these items were bought in conjunction with one another. This can be used to drive decisions about how to differentiate store assortment and merchandise, as well as to effectively combine offers of multiple products, within and across categories, to drive higher...