A Seasonal and Multilevel Association Based Approach for Market Basket Analysis in Retail Supermarket

Abstract

Market Basket Analysis is an observational data mining methodology to investigate the consumer buying behavior patterns in retail Supermarket. It analyzes customer baskets and explores the relationship among products that helps retailers to design store layouts, make various strategic plans and other merchandising decisions that have a big impact on retail marketing and sales. Frequent itemsets mining is the first step for market basket analysis. The association rules mining uncovers the relationship among products by looking what products the customers frequently purchase together. In retail marketing, the transactional database consists of many itemsets that are frequent only in a particular season however not taken into consideration as frequent in general. In some cases, association rules mining at lower data level with uniform support doesn't reflect any significant pattern however there is valuable information hiding behind it. To overcome those problems, we propose a methodology for mining seasonally frequent patterns and association rules with multilevel data environments. Our main contribution is to discover the hidden seasonal itemsets and extract the seasonal associations among products in additionally with the traditional strong regular rules in transactional database that shows the superiority for making season based merchandising decisions. The dataset has been generated from the transaction slips in large supermarket of Bangladesh that discover 442 more seasonal patterns as well as 1032 seasonal association rules in additionally with the regular rules for 0.1% minimum support and 50% minimum confidence.