Market basket analysis in a multiple store environment

Market basket analysis (also known as association-ruling mining) is a useful method of discovering customer purchasing patterns by extracting associations or co-occurrences from stores' transactional databases. Because the information obtained from the analysis can be used in forming marketing, sales, service, and operation strategies, it has drawn increased search interest. The existing methods, however, may fail to discover important purchasing patterns in a multi-store environment, because of an implicit assumption that products under consideration are on shelf all the time across all stores. In this paper, we propose a new method to overcome this weakness. Our empirical evaluation shows that the proposed method is computationally efficient, and that it has advantage over the traditional method when stores are diverse in size, product mix changes rapidly over time, and larger numbers of stores and periods are considered.