Behavioral Pattern-Based Customer Segmentation
from each cluster are very different from those gener-
ated from another cluster may be an effective method
for learning the natural categorizations.
Behavioral Pattern Representation:
Itemset
Behavioral patterns first need to be represented
properly before they can be used for clustering. In
many application domains, itemset is a reasonable
representation for behavioral patterns. We illustrate
how to use itemsets to represent behavioral patterns
by using Web browsing data as an example. Assume
we are analyzing Web data at a session level (continu-
ous clicks are grouped together to form a session for
the purpose of data analysis.). Features are first cre-
ated to describe the session. The features can include
those about time (e.g., average time spent per page),
quantity (e.g., number of sites visited), and order of
pages visited (e.g., first site) and therefore include
both categorical and numeric types. A conjunction of
atomic conditions on these attributes (an “itemset”) is
a good representation for common behavioral patterns
in the Web data. For example, {starting_time = morn-
ing, average_time_page < 2 minutes, num_cate gories
= 3, total_time < 10 minutes} is a behavioral pattern
that may capture a user’s specific “morning” pattern
of Web usage that involves looking at multiple sites
(e.g., work e-mail, news, finance) in a focused manner
such that the total time spent is low. Another common
pattern for this (same) user may be {starting_time =
night, most_visted_category = games}, reflecting the
user’s typical behavior at the end of the day.
Behavioral patterns from other domains (e.g. shop-
ping patterns in grocery stores) can be represented in
a similar fashion. The attribute and value pair (start-
ing_time = morning) can be treated as an item, and the
combination of such items form an itemset (or a pattern).
When we consider a cluster that contains objects with
similar behavior patterns, we expect these objects in
the cluster share many patterns (a list of itemsets).
Clustering Based on Frequent Itemsets
Clustering based on frequent-itemsets is recognized
as a distinct technique and is often categorized under
frequent-pattern based clustering methods (Han & Kam-
ber 2006). Even though not a lot of existing research

in this area addresses the problem of clustering based
on behavioral patterns, the methods can potentially be
modified for this purpose. Wang et al (1999) introduces
a clustering criterion suggesting that there should be
many large items within a cluster and little overlapping
of such items across clusters. They then use this crite-
rion to search for a good clustering solution. Wang et al
(1999) also points out that, for transaction data, methods
using pairwise similarity, such as k-means, have prob-
lems in forming a meaningful cluster. For transactions
that come naturally in collection of items, it is more
meaningful to use item/rule-based methods. Since we
can represent behavioral patterns into a collection of
items, we can potentially modify Wang et al (1999)
so that there are many large items within a cluster and
little overlapping of such items across clusters. Yang et
al (2002) addresses a similar problem as that in Wang
et al (1999), and does not use any pairwise distance
function. They study the problem of categorical data
clustering and propose a global criterion function that
tries to increase the intra-cluster overlapping of transac-
tion items by increasing the height-to-width ratio of the
cluster histogram. The drawback of Wang et al (1999)
and Yang et al (2002) for behavioral pattern based clus-
tering is that they are not able to generate a set of large
itemsets (a collection of behavioral patterns) within a
cluster. Yang & Padmanabhan (2003, 2005) define a
global goal and use this goal to guide the clustering
process. Compared to Wang et al (1999) and Yang et
al (2002), Yang & Padmanabhan (2003, 2005) take a
new perspective of associating itemsets with behavior
patterns and using that concept to guide the clustering
process. Using this approach, distinguishing itemsets
are identified to represent a cluster of transactions. As
noted previously in this chapter behavioral patterns
describing a cluster are represented by a set of itemsets
(for example, a set of two itemsets {weekend, second
site = eonline.com} and {weekday, second site = cnbc.
com}. Yang & Padmanabhan (2003, 2005) allow the
possibility to find a set of itemsets to describe a cluster
instead of just a set of items, which is the focus of other
item/itemsets-related work. In addition, the algorithms
presented in Wang et al (1999) and Yang et al (2002)
are very sensitive to the initial seeds that they pick,
while the clustering results in Yang & Padmanabhan
(2003, 2005) are stable. Wang et al (1999) and Yang et
al (2002) did not use the concept of pattern difference
and similarity.