• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.95-114
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• 2008

Recent interests in data mining result from the expansion of the amount of business data and the growing business needs for extracting valuable knowledge from the data and then utilizing it for decision making process. In particular, recent advances in association rule mining techniques enable us to acquire knowledge concerning sales patterns among individual items from the voluminous transactional data. Certainly, one of the major purposes of association rule mining is to utilize acquired knowledge in providing marketing strategies such as cross-selling, sales promotion, and shelf-space allocation. In spite of the potential applicability of association rule mining, unfortunately, it is not often the case that the marketing mix acquired from data mining leads to the realized profit. The main difficulty of mining-based profit realization can be found in the fact that tremendous numbers of patterns are discovered by the association rule mining. Due to the many patterns, data mining experts should perform additional mining of the results of initial mining in order to extract only actionable and profitable knowledge, which exhausts much time and costs. In the literature, a number of interestingness measures have been devised for estimating discovered patterns. Most of the measures can be directly calculated from what is known as a contingency table, which summarizes the sales frequencies of exclusive items or itemsets. A contingency table can provide brief insights into the relationship between two or more itemsets of concern. However, it is important to note that some useful information concerning sales transactions may be lost when a contingency table is constructed. For instance, information regarding the size of each market basket(i.e., the number of items in each transaction) cannot be described in a contingency table. It is natural that a larger basket has a tendency to consist of more sales patterns. Therefore, if two itemsets are sold together in a very large basket, it can be expected that the basket contains two or more patterns and that the two itemsets belong to mutually different patterns. Therefore, we should classify frequent itemset into two categories, inter-pattern co-occurrence and intra-pattern co-occurrence, and investigate the effect of the market basket size on the two categories. This notion implies that any interestingness measures for association rules should consider not only the total frequency of target itemsets but also the size of each basket. There have been many attempts on analyzing various interestingness measures in the literature. Most of them have conducted qualitative comparison among various measures. The studies proposed desirable properties of interestingness measures and then surveyed how many properties are obeyed by each measure. However, relatively few attentions have been made on evaluating how well the patterns discovered by each measure are regarded to be valuable in the real world. In this paper, attempts are made to propose two notions regarding association rule measures. First, a quantitative criterion for estimating accuracy of association rule measures is presented. According to this criterion, a measure can be considered to be accurate if it assigns high scores to meaningful patterns that actually exist and low scores to arbitrary patterns that co-occur by coincidence. Next, complementary measures are presented to improve the accuracy of traditional association rule measures. By adopting the factor of market basket size, the devised measures attempt to discriminate the co-occurrence of itemsets in a small basket from another co-occurrence in a large basket. Intensive computer simulations under various workloads were performed in order to analyze the accuracy of various interestingness measures including traditional measures and the proposed measures.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.15-33
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• 2017

This paper considers a Bayesian Network analysis for understanding the heterogeneous cross-category effects of different promotion activities and developing an efficient overall promotion strategy for a large retail store. More specifically we differentiate price reduction promotion and floor promotion and study their heterogeneous effect on consumer purchase behavior under a market basket setting. We then utilize Bayesian networks in identifying complex association structure in market basket dataset by analyzing the effects of different promotional activities and also include the effects of time, family income and size. We find from our Bayesian network analysis that the dominant cross-category promotion effect of price promotion is the indirect effect whereas the dominant cross-category promotion effect of floor promotion is the direct effect. Also, among the demographic variables we find that family size of the household is linked with more product categories compared to income and see that there are differences in the extent of the effects by product category. Finally, we also show the existence of products acting as a network hub and how they can be utilized by retailers faced with a limited marketing budget and suggest a more efficient promotion strategy.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.17D no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2010

Association rule mining techniques enable us to acquire knowledge concerning sales patterns among individual items from voluminous transactional data. Certainly, one of the major purposes of association rule mining is utilizing the acquired knowledge to provide marketing strategies such as catalogue design, cross-selling and shop allocation. However, this requires too much time and high cost to only extract the actionable and profitable knowledge from tremendous numbers of discovered patterns. In currently available literature, a number of interest measures have been devised to accelerate and systematize the process of pattern evaluation. Unfortunately, most of such measures, including support and confidence, are prone to yielding impractical results because they are calculated only from the sales frequencies of items. For instance, traditional measures cannot differentiate between the purchases in a small basket and those in a large shopping cart. Therefore, some adjustment should be made to the size of market baskets because there is a strong possibility that mutually irrelevant items could appear together in a large shopping cart. Contrary to the previous approaches, we attempted to consider market basket's size in calculating interest measures. Because the devised measure assigns different weights to individual purchases according to their basket sizes, we expect that the measure can minimize distortion of results caused by accidental patterns. Additionally, we performed intensive computer simulations under various environments, and we performed real case analyses to analyze the correctness and consistency of the devised measure.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.211-232
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• 2014

Recently, there is a growing interest toward social commerce using SNS(Social Networking Service), and the size of its market is also expanding due to popularization of smart phones, tablet PCs and other smart devices. Accordingly, various studies have been attempted but it is shown that most of the previous studies have been conducted from perspectives of the users. The purpose of this study is to derive user-centered CSF(Critical Success Factor) of social commerce from the previous studies and analyze the CSF perception gap between social commerce service providers and users. The CSF perception gap between two groups shows that there is a difference between ideal images the service providers hope for and the actual image the service users have on social commerce companies. This study provides effective improvement directions for social commerce companies by presenting current business problems and its solution plans. For this, This study selected Korea's representative social commerce business Ticket Monster, which is dominant in sales and staff size together with its excellent funding power through M&A by stock exchange with the US social commerce business Living Social with Amazon.com as a shareholder in August, 2011, as a target group of social commerce service provider. we have gathered questionnaires from both service providers and the users from October 22, 2012 until October 31, 2012 to conduct an empirical analysis. We surveyed 160 service providers of Ticket Monster We also surveyed 160 social commerce users who have experienced in using Ticket Monster service. Out of 320 surveys, 20 questionaries which were unfit or undependable were discarded. Consequently the remaining 300(service provider 150, user 150)were used for this empirical study. The statistics were analyzed using SPSS 12.0. Implications of the empirical analysis result of this study are as follows: First of all, There are order differences in the importance of social commerce CSF between two groups. While service providers regard Price Economic as the most important CSF influencing purchasing intention, the users regard 'Trust' as the most important CSF influencing purchasing intention. This means that the service providers have to utilize the unique strong point of social commerce which make the customers be trusted rathe than just focusing on selling product at a discounted price. It means that service Providers need to enhance effective communication skills by using SNS and play a vital role as a trusted adviser who provides curation services and explains the value of products through information filtering. Also, they need to pay attention to preventing consumer damages from deceptive and false advertising. service providers have to create the detailed reward system in case of a consumer damages caused by above problems. It can make strong ties with customers. Second, both service providers and users tend to consider that social commerce CSF influencing purchasing intention are Price Economic, Utility, Trust, and Word of Mouth Effect. Accordingly, it can be learned that users are expecting the benefit from the aspect of prices and economy when using social commerce, and service providers should be able to suggest the individualized discount benefit through diverse methods using social network service. Looking into it from the aspect of usefulness, service providers are required to get users to be cognizant of time-saving, efficiency, and convenience when they are using social commerce. Therefore, it is necessary to increase the usefulness of social commerce through the introduction of a new management strategy, such as intensification of search engine of the Website, facilitation in payment through shopping basket, and package distribution. Trust, as mentioned before, is the most important variable in consumers' mind, so it should definitely be managed for sustainable management. If the trust in social commerce should fall due to consumers' damage case due to false and puffery advertising forgeries, it could have a negative influence on the image of the social commerce industry in general. Instead of advertising with famous celebrities and using a bombastic amount of money on marketing expenses, the social commerce industry should be able to use the word of mouth effect between users by making use of the social network service, the major marketing method of initial social commerce. The word of mouth effect occurring from consumers' spontaneous self-marketer's duty performance can bring not only reduction effect in advertising cost to a service provider but it can also prepare the basis of discounted price suggestion to consumers; in this context, the word of mouth effect should be managed as the CSF of social commerce. Third, Trade safety was not derived as one of the CSF. Recently, with e-commerce like social commerce and Internet shopping increasing in a variety of methods, the importance of trade safety on the Internet also increases, but in this study result, trade safety wasn't evaluated as CSF of social commerce by both groups. This study judges that it's because both service provider groups and user group are perceiving that there is a reliable PG(Payment Gateway) which acts for e-payment of Internet transaction. Accordingly, it is understood that both two groups feel that social commerce can have a corporate identity by website and differentiation in products and services in sales, but don't feel a big difference by business in case of e-payment system. In other words, trade safety should be perceived as natural, basic universal service. Fourth, it's necessary that service providers should intensify the communication with users by making use of social network service which is the major marketing method of social commerce and should be able to use the word of mouth effect between users. The word of mouth effect occurring from consumers' spontaneous self- marketer's duty performance can bring not only reduction effect in advertising cost to a service provider but it can also prepare the basis of discounted price suggestion to consumers. in this context, it is judged that the word of mouth effect should be managed as CSF of social commerce. In this paper, the characteristics of social commerce are limited as five independent variables, however, if an additional study is proceeded with more various independent variables, more in-depth study results will be derived. In addition, this research targets social commerce service providers and the users, however, in the consideration of the fact that social commerce is a two-sided market, drawing CSF through an analysis of perception gap between social commerce service providers and its advertisement clients would be worth to be dealt with in a follow-up study.