Motivation & Application

supermarket shelf management → market-basket model

• Goal: identify items that are bought together by sufficiently many customers
• Approach: Process the sales data collected with barcode scanners to find dependencies among items

Applications 1

• Amazon’s people who bought X also bought Y
• Baskets = sets of products someone bought in one trip to the store
• items = products

Application 2

• Items that appear together too often could represent plagiarism
• Baskets = sentences
• Items = documents containing those sentences

Application 3