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Understanding Customer Malling Behavior in An Urban Shopping Mall Using Smartphones
Understanding Customer Malling Behavior in An Urban Shopping Mall Using Smartphones
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Customer behavior, shopping mall, smartphone
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UbiComp’13 Adjunct, September 8–12, 2013, Zurich, Switzerland.
Human information processing
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Session: 2nd ACM International Workshop on Mobile Systems UbiComp’13, September 8–12, 2013, Zurich, Switzerland
for Computational Social Science
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Session: 2nd ACM International Workshop on Mobile Systems UbiComp’13, September 8–12, 2013, Zurich, Switzerland
for Computational Social Science
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Session: 2nd ACM International Workshop on Mobile Systems UbiComp’13, September 8–12, 2013, Zurich, Switzerland
for Computational Social Science
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Size
Over 40’s 0 3
post-processing techniques. First, we merge
Gender(F/M) 7/5 98/85
consecutive stays of the same store. This reduces # of used traces 12 120
divided errors where a single store visit is detected as Trace hours
46.5/3.9/0.9 431.9/3.6/1.1
(total/avg/stdev)
two or more visits; it sometimes occurs when # of store visits 90 548 (estimated)
customers wander near the edge of the store or sit on a # of unique store visits 51 156 (estimated)
chair adjacent to the hallway. Second, we validate the Accelerometer (Hz) FASTEST (24.3) NORMAL (3.8)
Setting
Compass (Hz) FASTEST (15.5) N/A
recognized store by checking the entrance time and the Wi-Fi scanning interval Every 10 seconds Every 10 seconds
duration; we test if the visit time is outside the opening Camera Every 10 seconds N/A
hours of the store or the duration is less than minimum Table 1. Characteristics of collected data sets
meaningful duration, e.g. 3 minutes for retail shops and
20 minutes for fine dining restaurants. If it is size and sensor parameters of the data sets. As shown
invalidated, we select the next probable store. in the table, we collect two types of customer data
practically; tracked and blind data sets.
To adjust and evaluate the performance of our
extraction algorithm, we prepare a customer data set of The tracked data set with ground truth information
12 users with store visit ground truth. It shows fairly as like Figure 2(a) is utilized to develop and fine-tune
good precision and recall performance: 78.2% and the trace extraction algorithm. We recruited 12 users
82.4% respectively. We also compute them by via the bulletin board of a university campus. We
weighting visit duration, and get better performance: provided them with two Nexus One phones; one for
86.3% and 89.2% respectively. Higher recall values recording sensor data and another for ground truth as
indicate that the algorithm extracts most of actual visits shown in Figure 2(b). They were required to stay in the
well. The better performance of duration-weighted mall for at least 3 hours and visit more than 4 stores.
result shows that most of long visits are retrieved well The blind data set is used to build the customer
and errors are mainly caused for short visits. behavior model. It contains sensor data only and
customer traces are extracted by our extraction
Real-World Data Collection algorithm. It is contributed by a large number of real
To collect customer data in COEX Mall, we use customers who installed our sensor application and
unobtrusive sensors such as Wi-Fi, accelerometer and visited the mall autonomously. They were only required
compass, since they are regarded to well capture to provide simple information; phone number, age,
customer behavior in indoor situations and not to gender, visit purpose, and the number of companions.
interrupt the natural behavior. Table 1 shows the data We texted an electronic movie ticket as incentive.
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… Resting
Dessert
Bakery
C2 BR31, Smoothie King
C3 Paris Baguette
13
6
67
Hallway C4 Hallway(bench) 29
Cinema D1 Megabox 1
Seeing 2
Aquarium D2 COEX aquarium 1
Figure 2. Data collection at COEX Mall: (a) ground truth trace,
Reading Bookstore E1 Bandi&Luni’s 1 1
(b) phone position, and (c) ground truth tagging tool
Fun F1 Game, karaoke 3
Playing 11
Beauty care F2 Hair salon, nail shop 8
Collecting the ground truth traces was a challenging
Misc. Misc. X Medical, bank 40 40
task, since we do not want to miss any details of Total 353
movement such as when, and how long they visit which Table 2. Activity, store category, and store in COEX Mall
stores. Also, we do not want to interrupt customer’s
natural behavior. Our solution is to use one more Service Semantics – Activity Level
smartphone attached to users’ upper arm and takes In the activity level, we investigate the dynamics of
pictures of surround scenery periodically. This approach activity transition which gives a strong hint about why
rarely interrupts their behavior and it provides accurate customers are moving in urban shopping malls. We
and detail information on their movement. Concerning have approached this question in two perspectives; the
the energy consumption, we set the resolution to correlation between adjacent activities, and the
384×512 pixels and the shooting interval to 10 seconds. influence of the time of day [6].
Then, we manually tagged the ground truth traces as Table 3 shows the activity transition probability of real-
shown in Figure 2(c). world customers, i.e., the conditional probability of
specific next activities from current activities. Basically,
Customer Behavior Model Analysis most customers go to shopping stores often, and more
This section describes the customer behavior model likely when they visited another shopping store before.
extracted from real customer traces with respect to Customers who have been involved in reading, seeing
COEX Mall. Table 2 shows the malling activity and store and playing activities seem more likely to go resting to
category classifications in the mall. take a break.
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for Computational Social Science
filter out such visits from eating, the peaks in lunch and 0.6 Seeing
Probability
dinner times become more remarkable. Misc.
0.4 Shopping
0.2 Resting
Customer Preference – Store Category Level
Eating
In this level, we inspect the patterns of store category 0
7 12 17 22
selection when customers do an activity, which are Hour of Day
often determined by customer preference. We compare Figure 3. Activity probability over time of day
the store category patterns for customer groups of
fine dining (B4) more likely, but customers for killing
different demographics and visit purposes. We also
time never made such a choice. They are more likely to
present the association analysis results between store
use hallway benches (C4) for resting.
categories, similar to the market basket analysis widely
used in marketing research [14]. To examine the association between store categories,
we measure lift values. We only include store
Figure 4 presents store category probability distribution
categories whose supply value is over 0.15, i.e., visited
for shopping, eating and resting activities. Firstly, it
by more than 20 out of 132 customers. The higher
shows the distribution of overall customers; on average,
value indicates strong positive association between two
they often go to stationery/souvenir (A7) and clothes
store categories. Value 1.0 implies that they are
(A2) category for shopping, fast food (B2) and casual
independent of each other. Table 4 shows
dining (B3) for eating, and hallway bench (C4) and
representative results. Stationary/souvenir category
coffee (C1) for resting. We focus on some groups of
has strong association with fashion outlet, clothes, and
customers whose visit purpose is dating and killing time
accessory, as expected generally. The association
or customers who are teenagers and late 20’s. The
between food court and cosmetics seems the special
teenager group shows quite different distribution. They
case of COEX Mall; many of the cosmetics stores are
visited fashion outlet (A1), food court (B2) and bakery
located near the food court in the mall. Such positive
(C3) more likely. The figure also conforms to some
associations can be utilized by store owners to explore
general expectations. Customers for dating went for
business strategies and promote their stores. On the
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for Computational Social Science
Proportion
8
0
A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7
0.6 69
(b) eating (c) resting
38
0.4
32
23 27
0.2 19
6 11
0
B1 B2 B3 B4 B1 B2 B3 B4 B1 B2 B3 B4 B1 B2 B3 B4 B1 B2 B3 B4 C1 C2 C3 C4 C1 C2 C3 C4 C1 C2 C3 C4 C1 C2 C3 C4 C1 C2 C3 C4
other hand, store categories in the eating activity show Figure 5 shows the overall distribution of visit duration
negative associations with each other as expected, and moving time. The duration represents how long
since they are in the rival relation. Unexpectedly, the customers are staying in stores and the moving time
coffee and fast food pair also shows negative indicates how long it takes to walk to next stores from
association. This might be because fast food previous ones. As expected, customers spend much
restaurants sell beverages these days. more time for visiting than moving. Store visit duration
has a long tail due to some stores where customers sit
Physical Movement – Movement Level long usually such as cinema and fine dining restaurants.
In this level, we examine the physical characteristics of
We break down the visit duration distribution to
the intra- and inter-store movement. First, we figure
investigate different patterns by activity. Figure 6
out the temporal characteristics of the movement; the
shows that shopping has the shortest visit duration on
distribution of visit duration (intra-store) and moving
average, while seeing is the longest due to cinema.
time (inter-store). Then, we present the degree of
Note that the distribution of seeing is separated into
movement from the acceleration data, while visiting the
two groups clearly. The long visits are surely for
stores and moving around the hallways.
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1 1
0.8 0.8
Playing
0.6 Moving Time 0.6 Shopping
CDF
CDF
Eating Seeing
0.4 Visit Duration 0.4 Resting
0.2 0.2 Reading
Eating
0 0
0 60 120 180 240 0 5 10 15 20
Duration (min) Duration (min)
Figure 5. CDF of visit duration(stay) and moving time(walk) Figure 7. CDF of moving time (walk) per activity
1 1
1
Shopping Eating
0.8 Shopping 0.8
Shopping
Resting 0.5
0.6 Reading 0.6 Moving
Playing
CDF
CDF
0.4 Eating 0.4 0
Seeing Reading 0 1 2
0.2 Seeing Eating Resting
Seeing 0.2
Reading Shopping Moving
0 0 Playing
0 60 120 180 240 0 5 10 15
Duration (min) Standard Deviation of Acceleration Magnitude (g)
Figure 6. CDF of visit duration (stay) per activity Figure 8. CDF of standard deviation of magnitude
watching a movie in the theater, while the short visits We also investigate the degree of intra-store movement
seem for ticketing at the box office. per activity. The customer movement is usually
influenced by service semantics of a store [1]. We
We also break down the distribution of moving time by
measure the degree of movement using the standard
activity. See Figure 7 for the results. As compared to
deviation of acceleration magnitudes; high deviation
the other distributions, that of eating is slightly shifted
represents the high degree of movement. Figure 8
toward the right hand side, meaning that customers
shows the CDF of the standard deviation. As expected,
walk longer when they are looking for a place to eat.
customers hardly move while doing seeing and eating
There may be some tendency on the mobility
activities, whereas they browse in the stores of the
involvement of customers when they pursue different
shopping activity. However, the higher degree of
types of activities. Interestingly, the moving time
movement is clearly shown while they are moving in
distribution of the seeing activity is similar to that of
hallways. Such difference can be further utilized to
others. Since there is only one place in the mall, it is
allow the store recognition to distinguish better among
supposed to take more time to arrive. This might be
adjacent stores and hallways.
because customers wanting to see a move stay around
intentionally near the movie theater.
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Conclusion and Future Work Aware Mobile Advertising System for Urban Commercial
This paper presents MallingSense, a novel Complexes. In Proc. HotMobile 2011.
computational framework for customer malling [5] Bellotti, V., Begole, B., Chi, E.H., Ducheneaut, N.,
behavior understanding. The automated analysis Fang, J., Isaacs, E., King, T., Newman, M.W., Partridge,
K., Price, B., Rasmussen, P., Roberts, M., Schiano, D.J.,
framework that utilizes customers’ smartphones helps
and Walendowski, A., Activity-based serendipitous
us understand the characteristics of customer behavior recommendations with the Magitti mobile leisure guide.
and provides the fundamental basis of future customer In Proc. CHI 2008.
applications. We prototyped the framework in a real-
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proposed framework will be very useful for research on Shopping-Updated and Revised for the Internet, the
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services on top of the proposed framework. [9] Meschtscherjakov, A., Reitberger, W., Lankes, M.,
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Acknowledgements in a retail store. In Proc. UbiComp 2008.
This work was supported by the NRF grant funded by
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the Korea government(MSIP) (No. 2011-0018120) and analytics solution for tracking customer locations in
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10041313, UX-oriented Mobile SW Platform). [11] Kanda, T., Glas, D.F., Shiomi, M., Ishiguro, H., and
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