I can tell you my experience is that it's absolutely informative to take a look at running the recommendation stuff on things other than items (brands, categories, sub-categories, etc.). If you're in a multi-brand environment it can give you a great view into brand pen by customer groups pretty quickly. Instead of items just assign your categories (or brands, or types, etc.) an ID and pass them through the recommendation algos. And/or, if you'd like (and you have the metadata available), you can do the same with customer segments/groups/etc.
If you start to see deficiencies in brand spread for customers you don't expect (or, even, don't like) you can inject that feedback into your process. A good place to control that kind of thing is in the filter file and items file - here you can control what items (or categories, or sub-categories, or brands) make it into your output. You could even go so far as to exclude low-margin items, only generate recs for categories in a specific brand for which you're currently trying to increase penetration, etc. Long answer, but I strongly suggest it's a "yes" and based on experience dealing with this stuff day-to-day. Come to think of it, I think I owe a write-up on this whole kind of thing... -----Original Message----- From: Si Chen [mailto:sic...@opensourcestrategies.com] Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2014 8:15 PM To: user@mahout.apache.org Subject: market basket analysis of low sales volume products Hi everybody, I'd like to do some market basket analysis to suggest cross-sells, but many of the products are very low sales volume items, so in the past the results weren't that useful. Do you think it would make sense to do market basket analysis at more aggregate levels, for example by brand, product keywords, and product categories, to develop a set of heuristic rules? Then we can use those rules to say that even if we haven't sold product X, because it has brand A, category B, or type C, then it should be cross-sold with some other products. Does that sound like a reasonable strategy? Has anybody ever tried this? -- Si Chen Open Source Strategies, Inc. sic...@opensourcestrategies.com http://www.OpenSourceStrategies.com LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/opentaps Twitter: http://twitter.com/opentaps
