Market Basket Analysis using Association Rule Mining.

Recently, I got an opportunity to work on a project based on Market Basket Analysis, and here I am sharing my experience.

What is Market basket analysis?

Market Basket Analysis is one of the fundamental techniques used by large retailers to uncover the association between items. In other words, it allows retailers to identify the relationship between items which are more frequently bought together.

Association Rules :

Association Rules are widely used to analyze retail basket or transaction data, and are intended to identify strong rules discovered in transaction data using measures of interesting measures, based on the concept of strong rules.

An example of Association Rules

• Assume there are 100 customers
• 10 of them bought milk, 8 bought butter and 6 bought both of them.
• bought milk => bought butter
• support = P(Milk & Butter) = 6/100 = 0.06
• confidence = support/P(Butter) = 0.06/0.08 = 0.75
• lift = confidence/P(Milk) = 0.75/0.10 = 7.5

This example is extremely small. In practice, a rule needs the support of several hundred transactions, before it can be considered…