Unsupervised sparse matrix co-clustering for marketing and sales intelligence

  • Authors:
  • Anastasios Zouzias;Michail Vlachos;Nikolaos M. Freris

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada;IBM Zürich Research Laboratory, Switzerland;IBM Zürich Research Laboratory, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • PAKDD'12 Proceedings of the 16th Pacific-Asia conference on Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining - Volume Part I
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Business intelligence focuses on the discovery of useful retail patterns by combining both historical and prognostic data. Ultimate goal is the orchestration of more targeted sales and marketing efforts. A frequent analytic task includes the discovery of associations between customers and products. Matrix co-clustering techniques represent a common abstraction for solving this problem. We identify shortcomings of previous approaches, such as the explicit input for the number of co-clusters and the common assumption for existence of a block-diagonal matrix form. We address both of these issues and present techniques for automated matrix co-clustering. We formulate the problem as a recursive bisection on Fiedler vectors in conjunction with an eigengap-driven termination criterion. Our technique does not assume perfect block-diagonal matrix structure after reordering. We explore and identify off-diagonal cluster structures by devising a Gaussian-based density estimator. Finally, we show how to explicitly couple co-clustering with product recommendations, using real-world business intelligence data. The final outcome is a robust co-clustering algorithm that can discover in an automatic manner both disjoint and overlapping cluster structures, even in the preserve of noisy observations.