Improving Customer Relationship Management through Integrated Mining of Heterogeneous Data

Abstract

The volume of information available on the Internet and corporate intranets continues to increase along with the corresponding increase in the data (structured and unstructured) stored by many organizations. In customer relationship management, information is the raw material for decision making. For this to be effective, there is need to discover knowledge from the seamless integration of structured and unstructured data for completeness and comprehensiveness which is the main focus of this paper. In the integration process, the structured component is selected based on the resulting keywords from the unstructured text preprocessing process, and association rules is generated based on the modified GARW (Generating Association Rules Based on Weighting Scheme) Algorithm. The main contribution of this technique is that the unstructured component of the integration is based on Information retrieval technique which is based on content similarity of XML (Extensible Markup Language) document. This similarity is based on the combination of syntactic and semantic relevance. Experiments carried out revealed that the extracted association rules contain important features which form a worthy platform for making effective decisions as regards customer relationship management. The performance of the integration approach is also compared with a similar approach which uses just syntactic relevance in its information extraction process to reveal a significant reduction in the large itemsets and execution time. This leads to reduction in rules generated to more interesting ones due to the semantic clustering of XML documents introduced into the improved integrated mining technique.