Explorative association mining - Cross-sector knowledge for the European home textile industry

The European home-textile industry lacks cross-sector knowledge and knowledge about its end consumers. Click and ordering data reflect the consuming behaviour as well as the preferences and their changes. They are therefore an important trend indicator, which is not harnessed up to now by this industry sector. In this paper, we report on the solution of the Trend Analyser association mining component that helps designers and product developers to better understand their end consumers. Our component uses explorative data mining to perform a market basket analysis and identify interesting associations. Such associations can help decision makers to understand and study the consuming behaviour and identify early changes in their preferences in order to perform a better production planning.