Thursday, May 19, 2005

An Exploratory Look at Supermarket Shopping Paths

"We present exploratory analyses of an extraordinary new dataset that reveals the path taken by individual shoppers around an actual grocery store, as provided by RFID (radio frequency identification) tags located on their shopping carts. In order to explore the spatial patterns observed in the data, we present a multivariate clustering algorithm not yet seen in the marketing literature that is able to handle data sets with unique (and numerous) spatial constraints. The resulting output conveniently summarizes each cluster with an observed shopping path, thus enabling us to familiarize ourselves with the 'canonical trip types' that are typical of grocery store travel." Source: Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

Online Article | Full PDF Report

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