A Model of Heterogeneous Multicategory Choice for Market Basket Analysis

Abstract

Based on market basket data, multicategory purchase incidence models analyze demand interdependencies between product categories. We propose a finite mixture multivariate logit model to derive segment-specific intercategory effects of market basket purchase. Under the assumption that only a fraction of intercategory effects are significant, we exclude irrelevant effects by variable selection. This leads to a detailed description of consumers' shopping behavior that varies over segments not only w.r.t. parameters' values but also w.r.t. included interaction effects. We find that a homogeneous model would overestimate the intensity of interaction between product categories.