Extending market basket analysis with graph mining techniques: A real case

Abstract

A common problem for many companies, like retail stores, it is to find sets of products that are sold together. The only source of information available is the history of sales transactional data. Common techniques of market basket analysis fail when processing huge amounts of scattered data, finding meaningless relationships. We developed a novel approach for market basket analysis based on graph mining techniques, able to process millions of scattered transactions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in a wholesale supermarket chain and a retail supermarket chain, processing around 238,000,000 and 128,000,000 transactions respectively compared to classical approach.