Trend analysis based on explorative data and text mining

Trend-related industries like the European home-textile industry have to quickly adapt to evolving product trends and consumer behaviour in order to avoid economic risks generated by misproduction. Trend indicators are manifold, reaching from changes in ordered products and consumer behaviour to ideas and concepts published in magazines or presented at trade fairs. In this paper we report on the overall design of the Trend Analyser, a decision support system that helps designers and product developers of textile producers to perform market basket analyses as well as mining trend-relevant fashion magazines and other publications by trend-setters. Our tool design brings together explorative text and data mining methods in an ontology-based knowledge flow system, helping decision-makers to perform a better planning of their production.