Yinghui (Catherine) Yang, Ph.D
Graduate School of Management, UC Davis
Thursday, October 10
1131 Kemper Hall
3 :10-4:00 p.m.
Host: Bertram Ludaescher
A Pattern-based Clustering Approach for Web Transactions
Grouping customer transactions into categories helps understand customers better. The marketing literature has concentrated on identifying important segmentation variables (e.g., customer loyalty) and on using cluster analysis and mixture models for segmentation. The data mining literature has provided various clustering algorithms for segmentation without focusing specifically on clustering customer transactions. Building on the notion that observable customer transactions are generated by latent behavioral traits, in this paper we investigate using a pattern-based clustering approach to grouping customer transactions. We define an objective function that we maximize in order to achieve a good clustering of customer transactions and present an algorithm, GHIC, that groups customer transactions such that itemsets generated from each cluster, while similar to each other, are different from ones generated from others. We present experimental results from user-centric Web usage data that demonstrates that GHIC generates a highly effective clustering of transactions.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER. Yinghui (Catherine) Yang is an assistant professor of the Graduate School of Management at UC Davis. She earned her Ph.D. in Operations and Information management from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. Prof. Yang focuses her research in the field of data mining and Internet marketing. In the field of Data Mining, her research interests are in developing new data mining techniques that can be used in a variety of business applications, such as market segmentation, customer relationship management, personalization, and etc. Her research in Internet Marketing primarily focuses on building Economic and Econometric models for analyzing marketing activities on the Internet. Her research has been published in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, Proceedings of the Intl. World Wide Web Conference, Proceedings of the Workshop on Information Technology and Systems and etc. Prof. Yang teaches Database and Data Mining courses focusing on business applications to the MBA students at the Graduate School of Management.