Character String Analysis and Customer Path in Stream Data

This purpose of this study is to propose a knowledge-discovery system that can abstract helpful information from character strings representing shopper visits to product sections associated with positive and negative purchasing events by applying character string parsing technologies to stream data describing customer purchasing behavior inside a store. Taking data that traced customers´ movements we focus on the number of times customers stop by particular product sections, and by representing those visits in the form of character strings, we propose a way to efficiently handle large stream data. During our experiment, we abstract store-section visiting patterns that characterize customers who purchase a relatively larger volume of items, and are able to show the usefulness of these visiting patterns. In addition, we examine index functions, calculation time, and prediction accuracy, and clarify technological issues warranting further research. In the present study, we demonstrate the feasibility of employing stream data in the marketing field and the usefulness of the employing character parsing techniques.