Market Basket Analysis with Neural Gas Networks and Self-organizing Maps

Decker R, Monien K. Market Basket Analysis with Neural Gas Networks and Self-organizing Maps. Working Paper No. 3/02. Chair of Marketing, Bielefeld University; 2002.Market basket analysis has been an elementary part of quantitative decision support in retail marketing for many years and it is regularly cited as a prime application area of data mining. In this paper two competitive neural network approaches are presented and discussed with respect to their suitability for purchase interdependence analysis on the product category level. We particularly turn our attention to the user-oriented representation of cross category dependences. Both approaches are applied to point of sales scanner data provided by a German retail chain to check how far they are able to uncover presumed purchase interdependences