A new approach for association rules mining using computational and artificial intelligence

Market Intelligence is knowledge extracted from numerous data sources, both internal and external, to provide a holistic view of the market and to support decision-making. Association Rules Mining provides powerful data mining techniques for identifying associations and co-occurrences in large databases. Market Basket Analysis (MBA) uses ARM to gain insights from heterogeneous consumer shopping patterns and examines the effects of marketing initiatives. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) more and more finds its way to marketing, it entails fundamental changes in the skills-set required by marketers. For MBA, AI provides important ways to improve both the outcomes of the market basket analysis and the performance of the analysis process. In this study we demonstrate the effects of AI on MBA by our proposed new MBA model where results of computational intelligence are used in data preprocessing, in market segmentation and in finding market trends. We show with point-of-sale (POS) data of a small, local retailer that our proposed “Åbo algorithm” MBA model increases mining performance/intelligence and extract important marketing insights to assess both demand dynamics and product popularity trends. Additionally, the results show how, as related to the 80/20 percent rule, 78% of revenue is derived 16% of the product assortment.