An improved collaborative filtering approach for predicting cross-category purchases based on binary market basket data

Retail managers have been interested in learning about cross-category purchase behavior of their customers for a fairly long time. More recently, the task of inferring cross-category relationship patterns among retail assortments is gaining attraction due to its promotional potential within recommender systems used in online environments. Collaborative filtering algorithms are frequently used in such settings for the prediction of choices, preferences and/or ratings of online users. This paper investigates the suitability of such methods for situations when only binary pick-any customer information (i.e., choice/non-choice of items, such as shopping basket data) is available. We present an extension of collaborative filtering algorithms for such data situations and apply it to a real-world retail transaction dataset. The new method is benchmarked against more conventional algorithms and can be shown to deliver superior results in terms of predictive accuracy.