Mining changing customer segments in dynamic markets

Identifying customer segments and tracking their change over time is an important application for enterprises who need to understand what their customers expect from them - now and in the future. This in particular is important for businesses which operate in dynamic markets with customers who, driven by new innovations and competing products, have highly changing demands and attitudes. Customer segmentation is typically done by applying some form of cluster analysis to obtain a set of segments to which future customers are assigned to. In this paper, we present a system for customer segmentation which accounts for the dynamics of today's markets. It employs an approach based on the discovery of frequent itemsets and the analysis of their change over time which,. finally, results in a change-based notion of segment interestingness. Our approach allows us to detect arbitrary segments and analyse their temporal development. Thereby, our approach is assumption-free and pro-active and can be run continuously. Newly discovered segments or relevant changes will be reported automatically based on the application of several interestingness measures. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.