A Study of optimized clustering method based on SOM for CRM

CRM(Customer Relationship Management : CRM) is an advanced marketing supporting system which analyze customers\` transaction data and classify or target customer groups to effectively increase market share and profit. Many engines were developed to implements the function and those for classification and clustering are considered core ones. In this study, an improved clustering method based on SOM(Self-Organizing Maps : SOM) is proposed. The proposed clustering method finds the optimal number of clusters so that the effectiveness of clustering is increased. It considers all the data types existing in CRM data warehouses. In particular, and adaptive algorithm where the concepts of degeneration and fusion are applied to find optimal number of clusters. The feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method are demonstrated through simulation with simplified data of customers.