Market basket analysis

Remember, a successful analyst must not be guided by the methodology but instead think about the business problem, and only thereafter about the methodology that could provide the answers. Most practitioners of analysis/modeling think of the time series methodology as one where the final modeling dataset has a variable with a date or date-time stamp. But there could be other instances where time-stamped data might be transformed to conduct an analysis. Remember, transforming does not mean that the time element isn't important to the analysis methodology or insights generated. We will use this transformation for both market basket analysis (MBA) and clustering in this chapter. Let's look at data transformation in MBA to provide some context.

MBA's goal is to find common purchase items across customer's basket. It is also at times referred to as affinity or association analysis. This analysis is widely used in the retail sector but has found its takers in other domains...