An Investigation on Expanding Co-occurrence Criteria in Association Rule Mining

There is a large difference between purchasing patterns in an online shopping mall and in an offline market. This difference may be caused mainly by the difference in accessibility of online and offline markets. It means that an interval between the initial purchasing decision and its realization appears to be relatively short in an online shopping mall, because a customer can make an order immediately. Because of the short interval between a purchasing decision and its realization, an online shopping mall transaction usually contains fewer items than that of an offline market. In an offline market, customers usually keep some items in mind and buy them all at once a few days after deciding to buy them, instead of buying each item individually and immediately. On the contrary, more than 70% of online shopping mall transactions contain only one item. This statistic implies that traditional data mining techniques cannot be directly applied to online market analysis, because hardly any association rules can survive with an acceptable level of Support because of too many Null Transactions. Most market basket analyses on online shopping mall transactions, therefore, have been performed by expanding the co-occurrence criteria of traditional association rule mining. While the traditional co-occurrence criteria defines items purchased in one transaction as concurrently purchased items, the expanded co-occurrence criteria regards items purchased by a customer during some predefined period (e.g., a day) as concurrently purchased items. In studies using expanded co-occurrence criteria, however, the criteria has been defined arbitrarily by researchers without any theoretical grounds or agreement. The lack of clear grounds of adopting a certain co-occurrence criteria degrades the reliability of the analytical results. Moreover, it is hard to derive new meaningful findings by combining the outcomes of previous individual studies. In this paper, we attempt to compare expanded co-occurrence criteria and propose a guideline for selecting an appropriate one. First of all, we compare the accuracy of association rules discovered according to various co-occurrence criteria. By doing this experiment we expect that we can provide a guideline for selecting appropriate co-occurrence criteria that corresponds to the purpose of the analysis. Additionally, we will perform similar experiments with several groups of customers that are segmented by each customer's average duration between orders. By this experiment, we attempt to discover the relationship between the optimal co-occurrence criteria and the customer's average duration between orders. Finally, by a series of experiments, we expect that we can provide basic guidelines for developing customized recommendation systems. Our experiments use a real dataset acquired from one of the largest internet shopping malls in Korea. We use 66,278 transactions of 3,847 customers conducted during the last two years. Overall results show that the accuracy of association rules of frequent shoppers (whose average duration between orders is relatively short) is higher than that of causal shoppers. In addition we discover that with frequent shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears very high when the co-occurrence criteria of the training set corresponds to the validation set (i.e., target set). It implies that the co-occurrence criteria of frequent shoppers should be set according to the application purpose period. For example, an analyzer should use a day as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to offer a coupon valid only for a day to potential customers who will use the coupon. On the contrary, an analyzer should use a month as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to publish a coupon book that can be used for a month. In the case of causal shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears to not be affected by the period of the application purposes. The accuracy of the causal shoppers' association rules becomes higher when the longer co-occurrence criterion has been adopted. It implies that an analyzer has to set the co-occurrence criterion for as long as possible, regardless of the application purpose period.

연관규칙 마이닝에서의 동시성 기준 확장에 대한 연구

온라인 쇼핑몰은 인터넷을 통해 손쉽게 접근이 가능하기 때문에, 최초 구매의사가 발생한 시점으로부터 이에 대한 실제 구매가 실현되기까지의 기간이 오프라인 쇼핑몰에 비해 비교적 짧게 나타난다. 즉 오프라인 쇼핑몰의 경우 구매희망 물품을 바로 구매하기 보다는 몇 개의 물품들을 모아서 구매하는 행태가 일반적이다. 하지만, 인터넷 쇼핑몰의 경우 단 하나의 물품만을 포함하고 있는 주문이 전체 주문의 절반 이상을 차지한다. 따라서 온라인 쇼핑몰 데이터의 장바구니 분석에 전통적 데이터마이닝 기법을 그대로 적용할 경우, Null Transaction의 수가 지나치게 많음으로 인해 합리적 수준의 지지도(Support)를 만족시키는 규칙을 찾는 것이 매우 어렵게 된다. 이러한 이유로 온라인 데이터를 사용한 많은 연구는 동시성 기준을 여러 방법으로 확장하여 사용하였는데, 이들 동시성 기준은 명확한 근거나 합의 없이 연구자의 상황에 따라 임의로 선택된 측면이 있다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 온라인 마켓 분석에 적용되는 구매의 동시성 기준을 정확도 측면에서 평가함으로써, 구매의 동시성 기준 선정을 위한 근거를 제시하고자 한다. 또한 동시성 기준의 정확도가 고객의 평균 구매간격에 따라 상이하게 나타나는 것을 파악하여, 향후 고객의 특성에 따른 차별화된 추천 시스템 구축을 위한 기본 방향을 제시하고자 한다. 이를 위해 국내 대형 인터넷 쇼핑몰의 최근 2년간 실제 거래 내역을 대상으로 실험을 수행하였으며, 실험 결과 단골 고객의 구매 추천을 위한 분석의 경우 추천 범위와 분석 데이터의 동시성 기준을 맞추어 연관규칙을 도출하는 것이 바람직하며, 비단골 고객의 경우 대부분의 추천 범위에 대해서 분석 데이터의 동시성 기준을 비교적 길게 설정하여 연관규칙을 도출하는 것이 바람직한 것으로 나타났다.