ABSTRACT
Consider the hundreds, even thousands of products you can buy at your local grocery store. These items are often life-sustaining; almost every person on Earth nowadays relies on grocery stores for food and other household necessities. Because of this reliance, we have developed a certain expectation that our grocery stores will have what we need, when we need it, and for the most part, grocery stores around the world are successful in meeting this expectation. But, how do our grocery stores know which items to stock on their shelves, which items to direct our attention to in their marketing, which items to put together in packages or promotions? Increasingly, the answer to these types of questions is “data mining”. More specifically, Association Rule modeling within the larger discipline of data mining has become a valuable tool for not only grocery stores, but many types of organizations, in determining patterns of behavior and relationships in large sets of data. This chapter will present a case example of how a supermarket can use simple modeling and data manipulation tools in RapidMiner to create meaningful Association Rules.
