Data mining analysis on Italian family preferences and expenditures

Italian expenditures are a complex system. Every year the Italian National Bureau of Statistics (ISTAT) carries out a survey on the expenditure behavior of Italian families. The survey regards household expenditures on durable and daily goods and on various services. Our goal is here twofold: firstly we describe the most important characteristics of family behavior with respect to expenditures on goods and usage of different services; secondly possible relationships among these behaviors are highlighted and explained by social-demographical features of families. Different data mining techniques are jointly used to these aims so as to identify different capabilities of selected methods within these kinds of issues. In order to properly focalize on service usage, further investigation will be needed about the nature of investigated services (private or public) and, most of all, about their supply and effectiveness along the national territory1