Selective Marketing for Retailers to promote Stock using improved Ant Colony Algorithm

Abstract — Data mining is a knowledge discovery process which deals with analysing large storage of data in order to identify the relevant data. It is a powerful tool to uncover relationships within the data. Association rule mining is an important data mining model to mine frequent items in huge repository of data. It frames out association rules with the help of minimum support and confidence value which in turns paves way to identify the occurrence of frequent item sets. Frequent pattern mining starts from analysis of customers buying habits. From which various associations between the different items that the customers purchase are identified. With the help of such associations retailers perform selective marketing to promote their business. Biologically inspired algorithms have their process observed in nature as their origin. The best feature of Ant colony algorithm, which is a bio inspired algorithm based on the behaviour of natural ant colonies, is its parallel search over the problem data and previously obtained results from it. Dynamic memory management is done by pheromone updating operation. During each cycle, solutions are constructed by evaluation of the transition probability through pheromone level modification. An improved pheromone updating rule is used to find out all the frequent items. The proposed approach was tested using MATLAB along with WEKA toolkit. The experimental results prove that the stigmeric communication of improved ant colony algorithm helps in mining the frequent items faster and effectively than the existing algorithms