Lesson 4: Building a Sequence Clustering Scenario (Intermediate Data Mining Tutorial)

The marketing department of Adventure Works Cycles wants to understand how customers move through the Adventure Works Cycles Web site. The company suspects that there is a pattern to the order in which customers put products into their shopping baskets. They want to analyze the order of purchase sequences to learn how customers add related items to their baskets. They can then use this information to streamline the flow of the Web site so that it leads customers to purchase additional products.

After you complete the tasks in this lesson, you will have created a mining model that uses the Microsoft Sequence Clustering algorithm to predict the next item that customers will put into their shopping baskets. You will experiment with two versions of the model: one that analyzes only the order of products in the basket, and one that contains some additional customer demographics for clustering. Finally, you will use the models to create predictions that you can use to recommend products to customers.

To complete the tasks in the lesson, you will use the market basket mining structure that you created in Lesson 3: Building a Market Basket Scenario (Intermediate Data Mining Tutorial). This lesson contains the following tasks: