Market Basket Analysis in R

What’s in your basket? In this first chapter, you’ll learn how market basket analysis (MBA) can be used to look into baskets and dig into itemsets to better understand customers and predict their needs. Using tidyverse and dplyr you’ll discover how many baskets can be created from a given set of items, and learn the power of using market basket analysis for online shopping, offline shopping, and use cases beyond retail.

In this chapter, you’ll convert transactional datasets to a basket format, ready for analysis using the Apriori algorithm. You’ll then be introduced to the three main metrics for market basket analysis: support, confidence, and lift, before getting hands-on with the Apriori algorithm to extract rules from a transactional dataset. Lastly, You explore how the arules package is used for market basket analysis to retrieve basket rules and to help you find the most informative and relevant rules.

Let’s get visual. In this chapter, you’ll visually inspect the set of rules you have previously extracted. Visualizations in market basket analysis are vital given that often you are dealing with large sets of extracted rules. You’ll use the arulesViz package to create barplots, scatterplots, and graphs to visualize your sets of inferred rules. You’ll then turn sets of plots into interactive plots, making it is easier to drill into the mined association rules.

We’re going to the movies. In this final chapter, you’ll apply everything you’ve learned as you work with a movie dataset. Using market basket analysis you’ll turn this dataset into a movie recommendation system, using information from movie transactions to understand and predict what your audience might want to watch next.