• IE interfaces
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.86-96
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• 2006

Some customer data of manufacturing industries have a large number of incomplete data set due to the customer's infrequent purchasing behavior and the limitation of customer profile data gathered from sales representatives. So that, most sophisticated data analysis methods may not be applied directly. This paper proposes a heuristic data analysis method to classify customers in household appliances industries. The proposed PD (percent of difference) method can be used for the discriminant analysis of incomplete customer data with simple mathematical calculations. The method is composed of variable distribution estimation step, PD measure and cluster score evaluation steps, variable impact construction step, and segment assignment step. A real example is also presented.