String analysis technique for shopping path in a supermarket

摘要

The sensor network technology developed in recent years has made it possible to accurately track the in-store behavior of customers which was previously indeterminable. The information on the in-store behavior of customers obtained by using this technology, namely information on their shopping path, provides us with useful information concerning the customer’s purchasing behavior. The purpose of this research is to apply character string analysis techniques to shopping path data so as to analyze customers’ in-store behavior, and thereby clarify technical problems with them (the character string analysis techniques) as well as their usability. In this paper we generated character strings on visit patterns to store sections by focusing exclusively on customers stopping by these sections in order to elucidate the visiting patterns of customers who made a large quantity of purchases. In this paper, we were able to discover useful information by using the character string analysis technique EBONSAI, thereby illustrating the usability and usefulness of character string analysis techniques in shopping path analysis.