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Product Affinity Analysis To Increase Sales Using Machine Learning
Product Affinity Analysis To Increase Sales Using Machine Learning
Product Affinity Analysis To Increase Sales Using Machine Learning
Machine Learning
Sharon Joseph Mithun D J Rashmi Agarwal
Reva Academy for Corporate Reva Academy for Corporate Reva Academy for Corporate
Excellence – RACE REVA University Excellence – RACE REVA University Excellence – RACE REVA University
2022 Third International Conference on Smart Technologies in Computing, Electrical and Electronics (ICSTCEE) | 978-1-6654-5664-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICSTCEE56972.2022.10099568
Keywords— Machine Learning, Product Affinity Analysis, Cross- Product co-occurrence analysis is one area of research that
Selling, Market Basket Analysis, Apriori, CHAID, KNN, Deep
can help determine the relationship between various
Learning, Multilayer Perceptron
products. Affinity analysis and association rule learning are
I. INTRODUCTION two analytics techniques that aim to discover the relationships
and connections between specific objects. Market Basket
Every business aims to improve its revenue and profits, and Analysis (MBA) is probably the most well-known example
this is mainly achieved through increasing sales. Factors that identifies product associations by looking for product
which can increase sales are, acknowledging the current combinations that frequently co-occur in exchanges.
customer behavior, requesting customer feedback, running Individuals who purchase flour and sugar, also buy eggs since
promotions, determining sales strategies, launching sales a large proportion of them intend to bake a cake [3].
presentation techniques and methods and providing excellent
customer service. Other traditional methods are, creating In this study, the aim is to identify and understand the
packages, deals and free trials to attract customers, customers’ purchase behavior from the product sales
conducting a content audit, doing something noteworthy or transaction data and customer firmographics data, to find out
unique, optimizing social media profiles, advertising on the products that are more likely to be cross-sold or up-sold
social media platforms, spreading by word of mouth, putting to the different customer categories. This would help the sales
a call to action on users’ website, and to stay in touch with team to improve sales and increase revenue, by promoting the
email marketing [1]. However, this study focuses on some existing customers to purchase better or related products.
machine learning techniques to promote cross-selling and up-
selling opportunities.
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II. STATE OF ART well suited to more advanced analysis which is used to
perform the MBA [8].
Extensive literature reviews have been done on various topics
related to affinity analysis and the different methodologies Alternatively, the use of anonymized data from customers'
used to analyse product cross-selling and upselling. transactional orders to focus on descriptive analysis of
customer purchase patterns, items purchased together, and
The primary purpose of the work of the author here is to build units purchased frequently from the store to facilitate
a data mining method in excel using an XLMiner add-in tool reordering and maintaining adequate product stock, is
to accelerate cross-selling. It does not necessitate a great deal possible to accomplish this by analyzing the available data in
of expertise in data mining but only some parameter setting. such a way that a frequent item set can be identified and
Furthermore, almost everyone is proficient in Excel. analyzed to the association rule. The Apriori algorithm aids in
Therefore, the proposed excel-based method is simple to the discovery of association rules for frequent item sets and
learn and it also presents an example through mining the identification of correlations and the same is developed to
association rules [4]. investigate approaches for applying association rules to
recommender systems [9].
The main objective of the work done by the author is to
analyse large datasets thereby exploiting consumer behavior The latest study in 2022 by the authors states a binary
and making the correct decision leading to a competitive edge classification framework for predicting the successful upsell
over rivals. Experimental analysis has been done employing of products and services, using data from a
association rules using MBA to prove its worth over the telecommunications service provider. Through this
conventional methodologies. Online Analytical Processing prediction model, the recommender system for voice
(OLAP) tools have been commercially used for in-depth products and services to corporate customers of the
analysis such as data classification, clustering and telecommunications company is demonstrated. Logistic
characterization of data that changes over time [5]. regression classifier to automate the selection of customers
that are most likely to upsell. Application of a predictive
Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a supervised machine model to recommend a set of target customers to approach for
learning algorithm used for both classification and upselling, illustrating the different accuracy results for
regression. The ensemble learning method is proposed for different cost weightings and also showing that the success
classification using tensor data. The method is used in rate of upselling products to the selected customers is
identifying cross-selling opportunities to recommend dramatically improved when compared to the traditional
personalized products and services to customers. Two real- approach [10].
world databases are used to evaluate the performance of the
method and the SVM ensemble learning method, is proposed III. PROBLEM DEFINITION
for classification using tensor data. Computational results
show that the SVM ensemble learning method has good Traditional methods like publishing about the products on the
performance on these databases [6]. company website, digital marketing, advertisements, and
setting up campaigns are followed to sell the different
The next set of authors mostly used the Apriori algorithm for products to customers. The organization focuses on
MBA and revels, the relationship between the purchased delivering purpose-built, industry-specific, mission-critical
goods by using the Apriori algorithm to find out the data of enterprise software, tailored to the industry's needs and so it
shopping baskets from the massive data of consumers and is a time-consuming process to identify potential customers
then applying the association rules and Classification And and to sell products to them, which includes their
Regression Tree (CART) algorithm to reveal the requirements and customizations.
characteristics of the customer group and the target
customers’ classification. It is convenient for the goods to be Leveraging customer firmographic data and product sales
better configured and sold to extract more detailed and transaction data to build a model to project the likelihood to
valuable information, as well as to improve the market's purchase from our existing customer base and also solve the
operational efficiency[7]. business challenge of achieving and meeting the sales targets
of the organization is time-consuming. Increasing sales
The author here, claims that affinity analysis and association through product cross-selling and up-selling and identifying
rule mining encompasses a broad set of analytics techniques the customers to whom products can be sold is challenging.
aimed at revealing the associations and correlation between
specific objects. The purpose of this analysis is to generate a IV. METHODOLOGY
set of rules that relate two or more products together. Each of
these rules should have a lift greater than one. The interest is This paper uses the Cross Industry Standard Process for Data
in the support and confidence of those rules such as higher Mining (CRISP-DM) framework to implement and carry out
confidence rules are ones where there is a higher probability the different phases of the data mining and machine learning
of items on the Right Hand Side (RHS) being part of the processes involved in this study.
transaction given the presence of items on the Left Hand Side The CRISP-DM methodology mainly consists of six phases
(LHS). “R” is a great statistical and graphical analysis tool, and all these phases have an important role in the
implementation of the model.
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V. DESCRIPTION OF DATASET
Fig. 2 illustrates the detailed workflow of the model Some of the columns that contained financial data of the
developed. Initially, as part of the business understanding, organization and also the customer’s name, were masked for
discussions and meetings with the relevant stakeholders are data breach reasons during this study. Columns like the
conducted. The goal of maximizing the sales and the revenue region, industry, ownership type, product name, and product
of the organization is captured and the project plan is created. type are all important feature variables that help this study to
The data such as the product sales transaction data along with achieve new sales goals.
the customer firmographics data is collected from the internal
Salesforce system. Later the data is organized, explored,
visualized and verified for data quality. As part of the data VI. MODELING
preparation, relevant data is selected, cleaned, constructed, The modelling phase is the next important phase where
integrated and re-formatted to run the various techniques for several modelling techniques are applied to create and access
analysis and modelling. Exploratory data analysis is carried the models built.
out and different modelling techniques are performed. The
models are then assessed, evaluated for the results and
A. Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency (TURF)
reviewed. Finally, the model is iterated to verify if the
Analysis
business objectives are met and deployed for end users. In
this case, the deployment was to present the findings of this TURF analysis is a statistical research methodology that
study to management and provide them with ranks combinations of products by how many people will like
recommendations on what products can be sold and to which these combinations [11].
category of customers probable sales can be proposed.
TABLE I. TURF ANALYSIS RESULTS
Features Size of “Reach” “% of “Frequency” “% of Responses”
group Cases”
ADDED: TraverseGlobal 1 1160 13.2 1160 16.1
ADDED: Made2Manage 2 1941 22.1 1943 27
KEPT: TraverseGlobal
ADDED: Paragon 3 2462 28 2464 34.3
KEPT: Made2Manage, TraverseGlobal
ADDED: APIPro 4 2877 32.7 2879 40
KEPT: Made2Manage, Paragon, TraverseGlobal
ADDED: JustFood 5 3216 36.5 3221 44.8
KEPT: APIPro, Made2Manage, Paragon, TraverseGlobal
ADDED: WorkWiseERP 6 3549 40.3 3560 49.5
KEPT: APIPro, JustFood, Made2Manage, Paragon,
TraverseGlobal
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Table I shows the best frequency and reach values among Therefore, the association rules improvise the likelihood of
each group size. Unduplicated reach describes the proportion the results. Fig. 4 shows the web chart with strong product
of customers who selected at least one of the products within associations.
a portfolio. Frequency is the number of items desired within
the portfolio. Here, in group size 1 “Traverse Global” product
has a reach and frequency of 1160, this is also the total
number of customers who purchased this product. The
percentage of cases or respondents saying "yes" to the
product, is 13.2% of total customers who have a reach to this
product and the Percent of response is the single response out
of total responses from the given dataset which is 16.1% of
total customers who respond to the product. Similar is the
understanding for the other group sizes, where the percentage
of cases and responses keeps increasing with increasing
group size, where the number of products increases. Fig. 4. Web Chart showing product associations
Rule
Consequent Antecedent Instances Support % Confidence % Support % Lift Deployability
EDI Direct Full Circle ERP 81 13.61 98.77 13.45 7.17 0.17
Foodware BC Foodware 365 35 5.88 94.29 5.55 8.01 0.34
Oxaion ERP Syncos MES 28 4.71 92.86 4.37 17.82 0.34
OnContact CRM WorkWise ERP 81 13.61 92.59 12.61 5.35 1.01
bc Food bc EDI 45 7.56 62.22 4.71 6.38 2.86
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Fig. 7. Output of KNN Algorithm.
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Fig. 11 gives the importance chart which depicts the
importance of the independent variables in descending order.
Where the normalized importance score of Industry is 100%,
Product region is 88.6%, Product type is 72.8%, Customer
region is 55.6% and Ownership is 58.8%.
Forecasted
Actual 0 1 Correct %
0 79 5 94.00%
1 17 42 71.20%
Overall % 67.10% 32.90% 84.60%
Forecasted actual
0 1
Training 0 71 9 88.80%
actual 1 4 58 93.50%
Overall
52.80% 47.20% 90.80%
Percent
0 1
Testing 0 25 5 83.30%
actual 1 0 17 100.00%
Overall
Fig. 11. Normalized Importance chart Percent
53.20% 46.80% 89.40%
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From Table V, it is observed the overall accuracy of the From the model evaluation, the most efficient model is the
model is 91% for the training data and 89% for the test data. Decision Tree using the CHAID method, because of its high
indicating that the model is good, but not as good as the accuracy of 92% and precision value of 94%.
CHAID Decision tree algorithm. However, it is better than
the KNN methodology used. Key drivers influencing product sales as shown in the
decision tree are:
From the Classification report Tables III, IV, and V the a) Product Region – Selling region of the product.
confusion matrix values such as the True Positive (TP) which b) Product Type – To which category of product it belongs.
is the correctly predicted event value, False Positive (FP) c) Ownership – The type of ownership of the customer.
which is the incorrectly predicted event value, True Negative
(TN) which is the correctly predicted no-event values, and Other factors such as customer region and Industry are having
False Negative (FN) which is the incorrectly predicted no huge value categories. Therefore, they have not played an
event values. important role in the decision tree algorithm for predicting the
products that can be sold together.
B. Model Performance metrics
From this paper, the scope of more products that could be sold
Almost all model-performance metrics are calculated on the together to a customer can be understood. That is; if the
model's predictions being compared to the value of the Customer purchases product “A”, then the customer is more
dependent variable in a dataset. likely to purchase product “B”. Thus, the decision tree
modelling technique helps to conclude the association rules
TABLE VI. MODEL PERFORMANCE METRICS
to optimize the results.
Model Performance metrics
IX. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS
Models Precision Recall F1-score Accuracy
Decision Tree 94% 84% 89% 92% The main objective of the study is to understand the
KNN 89% 71% 79% 85% purchasing pattern of products from the product sales
MLP- Test 77% 100% 87% 89% transaction data, study and profile customers based on their
MLP-Train 87% 94% 90% 91% purchase behavior and recommend and suggest products to
customers, thereby increasing cross-sell and up-sell
opportunities.
From Table VI, it can be concluded that the Decision Tree
algorithm using the CHAID mechanism is the best model that One reason for MBA’s growing acceptance in the data
could be built for the analysis of the right products that can research fields is that researchers can evaluate the existence
be sold to customers. It has the highest precision and recall of association rules by using an inductive approach to
values of 94% and 92% respectively proving to be the best theorizing. Taking everything into account, a
model. recommendation system can significantly make an effect on
marketing and sales studies that can be used to derive
C. Accuracy Score strategic business decisions.
One metric for evaluating classification models is accuracy.
Informally, “accuracy is the percentage of correct predictions In this study, different modelling techniques are carried out
made by our model”. Formally, “accuracy is defined as the and evaluated to find out the key drivers responsible for
number of correct predictions/ Total number of predictions” cross-selling certain products. It is possible to profile
Table VII, shows that the decision tree is the best model out customers that belong to different categories based on these
of all the models that were built. key drivers and propose that for new customers who belong
to any of these categories, such products could be sold,
TABLE VII. ACCURACY SCORE thereby increasing sales opportunities in the organization and
Models Accuracy enabling the organization to reach its new goal of achieving
Decision Tree 92% sales targets and increasing customer base and maintain niche
KNN 85% enterprise products.
MLP- Test 89%
MLP-Train 91%
The study does not cover the cost and financial analysis, if
the financial data could be used for analysis, recommendation
VIII. RESULTS of the best possible products for upselling or cross-selling
will be possible, thereby increasing sales.
In the study presented in this paper, the dependent variable is
the variable indicating the purchase pattern of the customers A similar analysis can be used to model other combinations
who have purchased two or more products together and the of data in which more than two products are sold together.
independent variables are continuous variables that are used
to segment and profile the customers and the products to An understanding and study of the customers who add
enable up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. products to the cart but have incomplete transactions would
be a good study, to retain or increase the customer base.
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REFERENCES
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