Market Basket Analysis and

Advanced Data Mining

Professor Amit Basu
abasu@smu.edu
 What is Market Basket Analysis?
• Understanding behavior of shoppers
• What items are bought together
– What’s in each shopping cart/basket?
• Basket data consist of collection of transaction date and
items bought in a transaction
– Itemset
• How does this data differ from a transaction database?
– Pivoting
• Retail organizations interested in generating qualified
decisions and strategy based on analysis of transaction
data
– what to put on sale, how to place merchandise on shelves for
maximizing profit, customer segmentation based on buying pattern
 Examples
• Rule form: LHS RHS
– IF a customer buys diapers, THEN they also buy beer
• diapers  beer

– “Transactions that purchase bread and butter also

purchase milk”
• bread  butter  milk
– Customers who purchase maintenance agreements
are very likely to purchase large appliances
– When a new hardware store opens, one of the most
commonly sold items is toilet bowl cleaners
 Representations
What’s the difference between these patterns?

(a) Risk = 0.3 * sin(numcards * dem10.25) +

0.83 * (pastdef - dem2) * cos(employed+dem1)2

(b) Risk = 0.93 * priordefault + 0.23 * num_cards –

1.3 * employed – 0.734

(c) IF person has a good credit rating THEN they have

fewer accidents
 Evaluation
• Support : measure of how often the collection of items
in an association occur together as a percentage of all
the transactions
– In 2% of the purchases at hardware store, both pick and shovel
were bought
– support = #tuples(LHS, RHS)/N

• Confidence : confidence of rule “B given A” is a

measure of how much more likely it is that B occurs
when A has occurred
– 100% meaning that B always occurs if A has occurred
– confidence = #tuples(LHS, RHS) / #tuples(LHS)
– Example: bread and butter  milk [90%, 1%]
• Rules originating from the same itemset have identical
support but can have different confidence
 The association rules mining
problem
Generate all association rules from the
given dataset that have
• support greater than a specified minimum
and
• confidence greater than a specified minimum
 Examples
• Rule form:
– LHS RHS [confidence, support]
– diapers  beer [60%, 0.5%]
– “90% of transactions that purchase bread and
butter also purchase milk”
• bread and butter  milk [90%, 1%]
 Example
Large Itemsets with minsup=30%
Tr# Items
Itemset Support
T1 Beer, Milk
Bread 80
T2 Bread, Butter
Butter 60
T3 Bread, Butter, Jelly
Milk 40
T4 Bread, Butter, Milk
Beer 40
T5 Beer, Bread
Bread, Butter 60
Consider the itemset
Support({Bread, Butter})/support({Bread} = .75
{Bread, Butter}, and the two
i.e., Confidence(Bread  Butter) = 75%
possible rules
Support({Bread, Butter})/support({Butter} = 1
Bread  Butter
i.e. Confidence(Butter  Bread) = 100%
Butter  Bread
How Good is an Association Rule?
• Is support and confidence enough?
• Lift (improvement) tells us how much better a rule is at
predicting the result than just assuming the result in the
first place
– Lift = P(LHS^RHS) / (P(LHS).P(RHS)
• When lift > 1 then the rule is better at predicting the
result than guessing
• When lift < 1, the rule is doing worse than informed
guessing and using the Negative Rule produces a better
rule than guessing
 Computational Complexity
• Given d unique items:
– Total number of itemsets = 2d
– Total number of possible association rules:

 d   d  k 
R        
d 1 d k

 k   j 
k 1 j 1

 3  2 1
d d 1

If d=6, R = 602 rules

 The Problem of Lots of Data

• Fast Food Restaurant…could have 100 items on

its menu
– How many combinations are there with 3 different
menu items? 161,700 !
• Supermarket…10,000 or more unique items
– 50 million 2-item combinations
– 100 billion 3-item combinations
• Use of product hierarchies (groupings) helps
address this common issue
• Also, the number of transactions in a given time-
period could also be huge (hence expensive to
analyze)
 Preparing Data for MBA
• Determining scope of dataset (one or
many stores, what period, etc)
• Converting transaction data to itemsets
• Generalizing items to appropriate level
– Depends on objective of model
– Rolling up rare items to get adequate support
 Search Approach
Two sub-problems in discovering all association rules:

• Find all sets of items (itemsets) that have transaction

support above minimum support
– Itemsets that qualify are called large itemsets, and all others
small itemsets.

• Generate from each large itemset, rules that use items

from the large itemset.
• Given a large itemset Y, and X is a subset of Y
• Take the support of Y and divide it by the support of X
• If the ratio c is at least minconf, then X  (Y - X) is satisfied with
confidence factor c
 Reducing Number of
Candidates
• Apriori principle:
– If an itemset is large, then all of its subsets must
also be large

– Support of an itemset never exceeds the

support of its subsets
 The Apriori Algorithm
• Progressively
identifies large
itemsets of different A B C D
sizes
• Exploits the property AB AC AD BC BD CD
that any subset of a
large itemset is also
a large itemset ABC ABD ACD BCD
– Also, any superset of
a small itemset is also
small ABCD
 Extending MBA
• Dissociation rules
• Combining transaction data with complementary
data
– Shopper characteristics
– Store characteristics
– Seasonal factors
• Analyzing patterns over time
– Patterns that span multiple occasions
– Need to “sessionize” data
– Need to recognize shoppers across sessions
 Usability of Association Rules
Explainability High Intuitive explanations

Accuracy Moderate Depends on rule quality

Scalability Moderate/Low Performance of rule systems depends on

both no. and complexity of rules

Embeddability Moderate/high Can be compiled in many cases

Tolerance for sparse Low Support and confidence are both
data affected
Tolerance for noisy data Moderate How do you use outliers?

Development Speed Low/Moderate Needs lot of filtering

Dependence on Experts Moderate/high Domain experts to filter rules

 Advanced Data Mining
• Text Mining
• Mining non-textual data
– Image and video data (Multimedia)
• Spatial data
– GIS
• Temporal data
– Time series
– Behavioral patterns
• Web Mining
– Web usage
– Web content
 Mining Image Data
• Traditional pattern recognition
• Neural networks
– Supervised learning
• Discovering patterns
– Unsupervised learning
– Clustering
 Mining Spatial Data
• Spatial databases typically use special data
structures
– Extensions of tree-structured indexes
– Quad trees, R-trees, k-D trees, etc.
• Relationships based on spatial descriptors
– Overlapping, disjoint, contains, etc.
• Distance-based clustering
– Feature extraction
• Association rules
– If location is near lake, pollution is low
 Web Mining
Mining data that is obtained from the Web
• Web Content mining
• Web Usage mining
 Web Content Mining
• Search engines
• Spiders and Crawlers
• Metacrawlers
• A major challenge is the unstructured form
of the data
• Lack of high-level standards
• Abuse of descriptors (meta-information)
 Web Usage Mining
• Mining Web logs
• Data is relatively structured
• Data is highly dynamic
• Problems with identification and location
• The inherently non-linear aspects of Web
usage behavior
• Tracking both forward and backward links
• Dynamic personalization
 Issues and Trends
• Mining across multiple data sources and
sets
• Online mining – what are the patterns right
now?
• Concerns about privacy and other ethical
questions
– Property
– Accuracy