One post tagged with "data mining"

Finding items that are frequently shopped together is an interesting piece of information. For brick-and-mortar companies this can help to decide which items to offer promotions to attract more customers without comprimising the overall profitability. For online stores, it can help with being able to appropriately cross-sell items.

Frequent itemsets is a well studied data mining technique. Finding frequent pairs is a more specific but important variation since higher cardinality sets can be easily identified using lower cardinality sets. Depending on the size of data, finding the frequent pairs may have to be run on a cluster of computers to just as a single database query! When writing it as a SQL query, care must be taken to avoid performance issues. Below we investigate three different SQL queries all providing the same results.