I have done the equivalent thing with music (moving up from track to album to artist) with very good results.
On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 5:58 PM, Martin, Nick <[email protected]> wrote: > 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:[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2014 8:15 PM > To: [email protected] > 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. > [email protected] > http://www.OpenSourceStrategies.com > LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/opentaps > Twitter: http://twitter.com/opentaps >
