Data Mining with Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008

Chapter 10. Microsoft Sequence Clustering

Imagine that you are a marketing manager of a popular online retailer site. You sell various categories of products, including books, magazines, electronics, cookware, office products, and so on. Every day, thousands of web customers come to your site, navigating among different domains of your portal. In a physical shop, you can visually identify those departments and products that attract most customers and the customer interactions on various products. In a virtual store, you don't see your customers.

However, you still want to learn more about your customers to provide them with better services. You want to find out how your customers are using your site and the list of products for which they have shown interest. You also want to know the natural groups among these customers, based on their navigation patterns. For example, one group of customers shops for all sorts of products on your website, and others visit only certain categories of books and magazines.

This information not only gives you a clear picture of your customers' behaviors in your virtual shop, but also allows you to provide personalized shopping guidance to each customer, based on his or her profile. In this chapter, you will learn how to use the Microsoft Sequence Clustering algorithm to analyze navigation sequences and organize sequences into natural groups based on their similarities.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following:

• The principles of the Microsoft ...