1. For changing products, the ARM cannot be applied.

Eg in our case the deals keep changing

and mostly deal is the frequently bought items which results in other subset of frequent
item sets as result of these deals. Eg Mega Deal bucket can bias our ARM and prediction
certain time period as long as the deal runs. Question is how frequently we can run the ARM
and running on small period of data does not suffice a conclusion in any data set.

2. How are we segregating below 2 user cases in cart item selection?

Whether customer naturally selects consequent item set as predicted by our ARM.
from main menu screen or from the cart cross sell screen
–If this is the case then showing the already added item from menu page again on
cart page will not result in increased sales. We should rather make a rule that auto
detects whether consequent item in an Association pair is added from menu page. If
added from menu page show other items to users on cart page suggestions.

3. The support and confidence alone should not be criteria to decide association rules.
Below example shows how good support and confidence can be misleading to make us do
wrong conclusion. I would rather suggest use scatter plot that takes care of Support+
confidence+ lift together to predict right Associations.

In the model, we should draw a scatter plot to detect high support+ high confidence+ high
lift items and consider all threshold together with items only with lift strictly>1
4. Lowering the support and specially confidence threshold below 0.5 to detect certain
associations increase the number of spurious associations detected. I am not sure if less
than 0.3 confidence can mean any association.

eg: Consider the example of "rain" and "day". Assuming it is raining 50% of the time, and as
we know it is day 50% of the time, and these 2 things are independent of each other. But we
have quantitative value of support of 25% for predicting when it is a day it also rains and
confidence of 50%. But the lift is just 1 that decides there is no improvement of predicting
such an association.

Take another example of why high lift while ignoring support is also not ideal association
rule.

eg: some special burger and special extra cheese analogy, both items are usually bought
together but they are not part of the daily shopping. So the association rule is expected to
show a strong relationship between the items (high lift) but a quite low frequency in the
dataset (low support)

Basically, I am trying to say if data set is not huge than lowering threshold of support and
confidence will show relations even among non-related items.

 high support gives confidence that the association will be applicable to a large
amount of cases
 high confidence gives assurance that the association is correct often
 high lift gives confidence that it is not just a coincidence

Also, ideally conviction should also be included to make sure the associations are
generalizable for broader customer base.

5. Also, as mentioned before, to get veracity of the impact of MBA (market basket analysis) and
ARM we should measure it for certain considerable period of time. Unless it is resulting in
increased revenue due to Increased additional addition on cart page compared to previous
periods, it will not be complete say it resulted the impact of upsell. Few weeks if not month
should be compared.