CB2500 Information Management

Department of Information Systems, College of Business, City University of Hong Kong

Week 8 Tutorial Answer Sheet: Association Detection

You now run a supermarket and wonder what products customers are likely to purchase
together. Download a file called “retail.csv” from Canvas. Use SAS Enterprise Miner to
perform association detection and find the answers. Create suitable path diagram and run the
analysis. (Hint: Please make sure that set the role of “Score” to “transaction” and edit variables
to make sure that you input correct role to the transaction data. You need to have three roles,
namely, “Target”, “ID” and “Time ID” for the analysis.)

Please address the following questions in red and italic fonts.

(a) Please describe the steps to generate the association rules in SAS Enterprise Miner in
bullet point formats to describe each step (after you have created a new diagram). For
example, what components should you include in the diagram? Is there any property that
you should change?

Step1: Drag the ‘file import’ button and the ‘association’ button.
Step2: Create a relationship of two buttons by linking them together.
Step3: Click the ‘…’ symbol.
Step4: Insert the ‘retail.csv’ file.
Step5: Click ‘…’ symbol to edit variables.
Step6: Select ‘target’ for product, ‘ID’ for customers and ‘Time ID’ for sequence of
analysis.
Step7: Click ‘run’ to generate the result.

(b) Please write down the top 3 rules with the highest lift values.

1. Ham & Bread —> Egg

2. Butter —> Jam
3. Egg—> Ham & Bread

(c) If a customer purchases ham and bread, what else is he/she likely to purchase?

The customer is likely to purchase egg with ham and bread.

(d) If a customer buys bread and jam, what else is he/she likely to buy?

The customer is likely to buy butter with bread and jam.

(e) What managerial implications do you derive from the analysis results? Why?

Putting ham, bread, butter, jam and egg next to each other in the supermarket.

Smart Banking (BI) – Smart e-Services (ISSN) – Smart IS Auditing (ISA) – Smart Global Business (GBSM)
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