Customer Segment Prediction on Retail Transactional Data Using K-Means and Markov Model

Retailing is a dynamic business domain where commodities and goods are sold in small quantities directly to the customers.It deals with the end user customers of a supply-chain network and therefore has to accommodate the needs and desires of a large group of customers over varied utilities.The volume and volatility of the business makes it one of the prospectivefields for analytical study and data modeling.This is also why customer segmentation drives a key role in multiple retail business decisions such as marketing budgeting,customer targeting,customized offers,value proposition etc.The segmentation could be on various aspects such as demographics,historic behavior or preferences based on the use cases.In this paper,historic retail transactional data is used to segment the custo-mers using K-Means clustering and the results are utilized to arrive at a transition matrix which is used to predict the cluster movements over the time period using Markov Model algorithm.This helps in calculating the futuristic value a segment or a customer brings to the business.Strategic marketing designs and budgeting can be implemented using these results.The study is specifically useful for large scale marketing in domains such as e-commerce,insurance or retailers to segment,profile and measure the customer lifecycle value over a short period of time.

Activity Tendency and Dynamic Characteristics of Shanxi Fault Zone

The tendency and dynamic characteristics of horizontal movement along the Shanxi fault zone have been analyzed using the data obtained from 6 repeated measurements (1996～2001) in the GPS monitoring network arranged along the Shanxi fault zone. The results indicate: (1) the tendentious activity of the present stage is characterized by a W trending movement along the northern segment of the zone, an E trending movement along the southern segment and counter clockwise differential activity on the whole, but the intensity of the tendentious activity is not high. The tendentious differential movement is only about 3 mm/a in the direction perpendicular to the fault zone from the south to the north, and its stretch in the SN direction is only 1 mm/a and mainly occurs along the north segment of the fault; (2) The azimuth of the principal compressive stress field reflected by the tendentious movement is 72°; (3) The property of annual activity is not the same, even contrary to one another or deviates from the tendentious activity. Therefore, the parameters of the strain field derived from them dont reflect the physical characteristics of the basic stress field. (4) The high frequency movement (yearly) does not only exist but is also complicated by an intensity several times higher than that of the tendentious movement; (5) Obvious differential movements, including strike slip, can not be seen in either in secular activity or annual activity on both sides of any fault. The tendentious movement not only verifies the conjecture of “strong in the south and weak in north”, which is the basic feature forcing the western boundary of the North China area, but it also extends to the hinterland of North China. The fact that there is no obvious differential activity on both sides of the fault might indicate that the differential activity among the intraplate blocks is completed by gradual variation in a certain space, rather than the abrupt change bordered by a fault or narrow stripe zone. The obvious dynamic activity might indicate: (1) there is stress disturbance in the basic stress field; (2) the inhomogeneous or non synchronous variation that appeared in the regional stress and strain fields was due to the different physical property of the medium; (3)the response occurred because of a variety of external variations. The movement in 2001 shows that the Daixian county and its adjacent area might be the boundary segment for the relative differential activity. More attention should be paid here.

A prediction on each segmented commercial vehicle market in 2007

Heavy truck The market trend has recovered since May 2006 and it reported a year on year growth of 30.55 percent by the end of Dec. The result was partly due to the heavy fall in the second half of 2005.

Investigating the influence of segmentation in estimating safety performance functions for roadway sections

Safety performance functions（SPFs） are crucial to science-based road safety management.Success in developing and applying SPFs, apart data quality and availability, depends fundamentally on two key factors： the validity of the statistical inferences for the available data and on how well the data can be organized into distinct homogeneous entities. The latter aspect plays a key role in the identification and treatment of road sections or corridors with problems related to safety. Indeed, the segmentation of a road network could be especially critical in the development of SPFs that could be used in safety management for roadway types, such as motorways（freeways in North America）, which have a large number of variables that could result in very short segments if these are desired to be homogeneous. This consequence, from an analytical point of view, can be a problem when the location of crashes is not precise and when there is an overabundance of segments with zero crashes. Lengthening the segments for developing and applying SPFs can mitigate this problem, but at a sacrifice of homogeneity. This paper seeks to address this dilemma by investigating four approaches for segmentation for motorways, using sample data from Italy. The best results were obtained for the segmentation based on two curves and two tangents within a segment and with fixed length segments. The segmentation characterized by a constant value of all original variables inside each segment was the poorest approach by all measures.