Spatially enabled customer segmentation using a data classification method with uncertain predicates

Abstract

Spatial attributes are important factors for predicting customer behavior. However, thorough studies on this subject have never been carried out. This paper presents a new idea that incorporates spatial predicates describing the spatial relationships between customer locations and surrounding objects into customer attributes. More specifically, we developed two algorithms in order to achieve spatially enabled customer segmentation. First, a novel filtration algorithm is proposed that can select more relevant predicates from the huge amounts of spatial predicates than existing filtration algorithms. Second, since spatial predicates fundamentally involve some uncertainties, a rough set-based spatial data classification algorithm is developed to handle the uncertainties and therefore provide effective spatial data classification. A series of experiments were conducted and the results indicate that our proposed methods are superior to existing methods for data classification.