Temporal Customer Segmentation Using the Self-organizing Time Map

  • Authors:
  • Zhiyuan Yao;Peter Sarlin;Tomas Eklund;Barbro Back

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IV '12 Proceedings of the 2012 16th International Conference on Information Visualisation
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Visual clustering provides effective tools for understanding relationships among clusters in a data space. This paper applies an adaptation of the standard Self-Organizing Map for visual temporal clustering in exploring the customer base and tracking customer behavior of a department store over a 22-week period. In contrast to traditional clustering techniques, which often provide a static snapshot of the customer base and overlook the possible dynamics, the Self-Organizing Time Map enables exploring complex patterns over time by visualizing the results in a user-friendly way. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the application using department store data with more than half a million rows of weekly aggregated customer information.