Sunday, April 13, 2008

Market Basket Analysis

Some time ago, one of the Accounting Division’s staff asked me to reveal if the last decision of the Bank about introducing new participation papers were successful or not; also, he asked me to specify what percent of its sales were because of changing other deposits.
It was a hard job, because we had not any clear idea on how to deal with this matter! It had done, but I kept thinking about solving this problem via Business Intelligence Solutions rather than executing complex queries on databases.
When I was reading “The Data Warehouse Toolkit Second Edition”, I realized that it is very similar to “Market Basket Analysis” concept, and after doing some search it began to sink in.
Indeed, I found it out that it could be done via association algorithm of the Data Mining. This subject is about the market basket analysis, and finding the association of products based on their sales, in order to offer new discount for increasing the sales.
For instance, you can imagine that when you find it out that the toothpaste and toothbrush were sold together in most situations, it could be a good starting point for designing new promotion!