Learning Data Mining with Python - Second Edition

Product recommendations

One of the issues with moving a traditional business online, such as commerce, is that tasks that used to be done by humans need to be automated for the online business to scale and compete with existing automated businesses. One example of this is up-selling, or selling an extra item to a customer who is already buying. Automated product recommendations through data mining are one of the driving forces behind the e-commerce revolution that is turning billions of dollars per year into revenue.

In this example, we are going to focus on a basic product recommendation service. We design this based on the following idea: when two items are historically purchased together, they are more likely to be purchased together in ...