A Model for Trend Analysis in the Online Shopping Scenario Using Multilevel Hesitation Pattern Mining

The present paper proposes a new model for the exploration of hesitated patterns from multiple levels of conceptual hierarchy in the transactional dataset. The usual practice of mining patterns has focused on identifying frequent patterns (i.e., which occur together) in the transactional dataset but uncovers the vital information about the patterns which are almost frequent (but not exactly frequent) called “hesitated patterns.” The proposed model uses the reduced minimum support threshold (contains two values: attractiveness and hesitation) and constant minimum confidence threshold with the top-down progressive deepening approach for generating patterns and utilizing the apriori property. To validate the model, an online purchasing scenario of books through e-commerce-based online shopping platforms such as Amazon has been considered and shown that how the various factors contributed towards building hesitation to purchase a book at the time of purchasing. The present work suggests a novel way for deriving hesitated patterns from multiple levels in the conceptual hierarchy with respect to the target dataset. Moreover, it is observed that the concepts and theories available in the existing related work Lu and Ng (2007) are only focusing on the introductory aspect of vague set theory-based hesitation association rule mining, which is not useful for handling the patterns from multiple levels of granularity, while the proposed model is complete in nature and addresses the very significant and untouched problem of mining “multilevel hesitated patterns” and is certainly useful for exploring the hesitated patterns from multiple levels of granularity based on the considered hesitation status in a transactional dataset. These hesitated patterns can be further utilized by decision makers and business analysts to build the strategy on how to increase the attraction level of such hesitated items (appeared in a particular transaction/set of transactions in a given dataset) to convert their state from hesitated to preferred items.