A Post-Analysis of Decision Tree to Detect the Change of Customer Behavior on Internet Shopping Mall

Understanding and adapting to changes of customer behavior in internet shopping mall is an important aspect to survive in continuously changing environment. This paper develops a methodology based on decision tree algorithms to detect changes of customer behavior automatically from customer profiles and sales data at different time snapshots. We first define three types of changes as emerging pattern, unexpected change and the added/perished rule. Then, it is developed similarity and difference measures for rule matching to detect all types of change. Finally, the degree of change is developed to evaluate the amount of change. A Korean internet shopping mall case is evaluated to represent the performance of our methodology. And practical business implications for this methodology are also provided.