See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/265109861

Usage of cluster analysis in consumer behavior research

Article · August 2012

CITATIONS READS

4 3,590

3 authors:

Pavel Turčínek Jiri Stastny

Mendel University in Brno Mendel University in Brno
23 PUBLICATIONS   67 CITATIONS    104 PUBLICATIONS   697 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Arnost Motycka
Mendel University in Brno
24 PUBLICATIONS   57 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Work-Based Learning in Future IT Professionals Education View project

FITPED-AI: Future IT Professionals EDucation in Artificial Intelligence (Erasmus+ Programme) View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Jiri Stastny on 17 October 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Advances in Applied Information Science

Usage of cluster analysis in consumer behavior research

PAVEL TURCINEK, JIRI STASTNY, ARNOST MOTYCKA
Department of Informatics
Mendel University in Brno
Zemedelska 1, 61300 Brno
CZECH REPUBLIC
pavel.turcinek@mendelu.cz, jiri.stastny@mendelu.cz, mot@mendelu.cz

Abstract: - This article discusses a case study that deals with the application of clustering methods in data
mining research in consumer behavior in the food market. The data obtained questionnaire survey of the
Institute of Marketing and Trade of Faculty of Business and Economics of Mendel University in Brno are
applied to different types of cluster analysis algorithms to find market segments. The aim of this study is to
identify the possibilities of these methods in the issues and describe their suitability or unsuitability for solving
such problems.

Key-Words: - Cluster analysis, Data mining, Consumer behavior, Marketing Research, Application of methods
of knowledge discovery in marketing, Data processing.

1 Introduction surveys in which consumers respond to specific

The issue of consumer behavior falls into the field
of marketing. Into the topic of consumer behavior
can be included categories of knowledge and
understanding of how consumers think, feel,
evaluate, choose among different alternatives, how
consumers are influenced by their environment, how
they act during the decision-making and purchasing,
how they are limited by their knowledge and ability
to process information, what motivates them and
how they differ in their decision-making in different
ways depending on the importance or interest in the
product [1].
Perceptions of information and communication
technologies are gradually changing from something
rather unique, bringing a competitive advantage in
the market, to the necessity of determining existence
or absence between competitive business
organizations [2]. Nowadays you cannot imagine
marketing without the involvement of information
technology. The development of the Internet greatly
simplified data collection, and so the volume of
usable data to search for information has increased
manifold.
For the research of consumer behavior data can
be obtained from multiple sources. For secondary
research are typically used from national and
international sources, such as the Czech Statistical
Office or Eurostat, which provide data in electronic
form and are easily accessible via the Web. In the
primary research are most often used data from
questions.
This article will address the possibilities of how
to find specific groups of consumers in the food
market of Czech Republic. The article will be based
on primary data that was taken out of the research
institute of marketing and sales at the Faculty of
Economics Mendel University in Brno [3].
2 Consumer Behaviour
Consumer behavior is the multidisciplinary topic, as
no self-discipline is able to provide a comprehensive
view. Experimental psychology is focused on
analyzing the role of product in the processes of
perception, learning and remembering. Clinical
psychology examines the role of the product in the
psychological adjustment, microeconomics looks at
the role of the product in terms of allocation of
individual and family resources, social psychology
analyzes the role of the product in customer
behavior as a member of social groups, while
sociology is looking for an answer to what role has
the product in social institutions and group relations
[1].
2.1 Collection and processing of data
Collection and processing of data is focused on
applying several methods which their logical
sequence allows complex analysis of behavior or
decision making of consumers, hence the
implementation of predictions and qualified

ISBN: 978-1-61804-113-5 172

 Advances in Applied Information Science
estimations of future development. These are
secondary data collection instrument of national and
international sources, primary data collection
through marketing research and data processing
applications selected statistical methods [4]. Data is
usually necessary prepare for analysis [5].
3 Cluster analysis
Cluster analysis is a multidimensional statistical
method that is used to classify objects. The basic
problem of cluster analysis is to classify objects into
groups (clusters), so that the two objects in the same
cluster are more similar than two objects of different
clusters [6].
Fig. 1. Different ways of clustering identical points [7].
The first problem is to determine the similarity of
two objects. To be measured in similarity, each
object must be characterized by their properties [6].
Properties of objects can be divided into several
categories. Han and Kamber [8] reported these types
of variables:
• Interval-Scaled variables
• Binary variables
• Categorical variables
• Ordinal variables
• Ratio-Scaled variables
How to determine the similarity respectively
differences of individual criteria is described in
detail [8, 9] and others.
3.1 Types of methods of cluster analysis
You can find very many algorithms for creating
clusters. It is however difficult, is clearly divided
into different categories, as some of them may
ISBN: 978-1-61804-113-5
For a better understanding how it can be difficult
to determine the format of individual clusters in
Figure 1 is shown three different ways to divide the
twenty points are assigned to groups. The shapes of
objects determine the jurisdiction of individual
clusters. Figures 1 (b) and 1 (d) divide the data into
two or six parts. However, the apparent breakdown
of each of the two major clusters of three sub
clusters can only be caused by the activities of the
human visual system. In some cases it may be
reasonable to classify items into four groups as
shown in Figure 1 (c). Figure 1 thus shows that the
creation of clusters is not clear. The optimal
allocation depends on the nature of the required data
and the results of [7].
exceed its category. Han and Kamber [8] offer the
following breakdown:
Partitioning methods enable to divide 𝑛 objects
into k groups, where 𝑘 ≤ 𝑛. These methods must be
complied with two requirements:
a) each group must contain at least one
object,
b) each object must belong to just one
group.
At first, the appropriate method divides objects
into 𝑘 groups. Subsequently, the algorithm starts the
appropriate distribution of objects between groups.
The algorithm can be terminated after a certain
number of iterations or if they no longer move it.
Hierarchical methods create a hierarchical
decomposition of objects. Depending on how this
decomposition is carried out the hierarchical
methods are divided agglomerative (bottom-up),
where at the beginning of each object forms its own
class and then there are the most similar pool into
173
 Advances in Applied Information Science

one class, and divisive (top-down), where all objects
are first in one class, which is subdivided until it
reaches the desired level of distribution.
Density-based methods find the clusters with
large density of objects in the data area that is
separated from areas with low densities occurring
objects. These methods allow users to find clusters
of different shapes and are also capable of dealing
with the occurrence of noise and outliers in the data.
Grid-based methods transform the object space
into a finite number of cells that form a grid
structure. All clustering operations are performed on
the structure of the grid. The main advantage of this
approach is its speed of processing, which is usually
independent of the number of data objects and
depends only on the number of cells in each
dimension.
Model-based methods try to optimize
consistency between the dataset and some
mathematical model, which means that they try to
find such clusters, which would most correspond to
that model.
Methods for clustering high-dimensional data
allow transformation or selection of attributes to
reduce the number of dimensions while preserving
the relevant distances between objects [8].
Individual examples of algorithms are presented
and describe in [6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13].
4 Data source
Data file, on which is performed the knowledge
discovery was acquired in the survey of the
Department of Marketing and Trade of Faculty of
Business and Economics of the Mendel University
in Brno. Marketing research was focused on the
behavior of consumers in the food market in the
Czech Republic. The questionnaire contained thirty
items related to the research questions (low price,
product composition, ...), which respondents rated
on scale from 1 to 10, where a value of 10
determined that this criterion has the highest
importance to the interviewee. Another eight
questions then characterized the respondent (age,
sex, educational level, etc.) [3]. By applying data
mining methods to this kind of data, interesting
patterns concerning the customers behaviour can be
identified [14].
5 Finding the clusters
In finding clusters it has been used several
algorithms. It was a K-means algorithm,
Expectation-Maximization, and DBSCAN algorithm
for hierarchical clustering. Because of absence of
knowledge of number of clusters in dataset at first
we focused on the methods, which do not require
this information. As input criteria were selected
thirty items related to the issue of consumer
behavior.
At first it was tested DBSCAN method. With
default setting (𝑀𝑖𝑛𝑃𝑡𝑠 = 6, 𝜀 = 0.9), there was no
cluster. All objects were identified as noise. So the
parameters were modified. The following table
shows the values for selected parameters.

Table 1. Results of the DBSCAN method.

Number of objects
No. 𝑀𝑖𝑛𝑃𝑡𝑠 𝜀 Number of clusters (the frequency of individual clusters) identified as noise
1 6 0.9 0 2020
2 4 3.9 7 (90, 4, 7, 11, 4, 4, 4) 1896
3 4 5.9 1 (2020) 0
4 4 4.9 1 (2020) 0
5 5 4.9 1 (2020) 0
6 7 4.9 1 (2020) 0
7 7 4.3 3 (1068, 7, 7) 938
8 5 4.0 3 (90, 7, 11) 1912
9 5 4.1 6 (212, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5) 1783
10 4 4.1 8 (223, 20, 7, 5, 5, 4, 4, 5) 1747
11 4 4.2 10 (643, 4, 4, 4, 6, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4) 1339
12 3 4.2 20 (725, 3, 3, 6, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 4, 7, 4, 5, 3, 5, 3, 3, 3) 1221
13 3 4.0 9 (107, 3, 8, 11, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4) 1874

ISBN: 978-1-61804-113-5 174

 Advances in Applied Information Science

The table is not a list of all the tested values. But
all the other attempts to set the parameters so that
the output would produce consistently large clusters
this method failed. As the table shows, applications
DBSCAN method to data from the survey, usually
we get one large cluster and several other of
negligible size. For this reason, this method can be
considered for such data unsuitable conceived.
As a second division option was chosen
hierarchical clustering. Even using this method, we
have not come to the desired distribution. When
applying this method, almost exclusively occurred
that one object was separated from the rest. For this
reason, is this hierarchical clustering method
unsuitable for our purpose.
Another method which has been tested was
Expectation-Maximization. In gaining the outputs of
this method were gradually adjusted value of the
minimum standard deviation (𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑆𝑡𝑑𝐷𝑒𝑣) and the
maximum number of iterations. Table 2
demonstrates the results.
As the table shows the number of iterations does
not influence result is too big. Besides one case
where the number of elements in different clusters
differed by a maximum of two, was no effect of
number of iterations. It is possible that in the event
of a further increase in the number of iterations
causing major changes, but the period during which
the algorithm was carried out, would be too long.

Table 2. Results of EM method.

No. 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑆𝑡𝑑𝐷𝑒𝑣 number of iterations Number of clusters (the frequency of individual clusters)
1 0.000001 100 10 (166, 251, 234, 267, 176, 195, 138, 274, 156, 163)
2 0.000001 200 10 (166, 251, 234, 267, 176, 195, 138, 274, 156, 163)
3 0.00001 100 10 (166, 251, 234, 267, 176, 195, 138, 274, 156, 163)
4 0.0001 100 10 (166, 251, 234, 267, 176, 195, 138, 274, 156, 163)
5 0.0001 500 10 (166, 251, 234, 267, 176, 195, 138, 274, 156, 163)
6 0.001 100 10 (166, 251, 234, 267, 176, 195, 138, 274, 156, 163)
7 0.005 1000 10 (166, 251, 234, 267, 176, 195, 138, 274, 156, 163)
8 0.01 100 7 (472, 342, 237, 189, 323, 282, 175)
9 0.1 100 7 (472, 342, 237, 189, 323, 282, 175)
10 0.5 100 8 (308, 305, 151, 288, 290, 256, 249, 173)
11 1 100 10 (178, 244, 193, 356, 99, 165, 132, 293, 206, 154)
12 1 1000 10 (176, 244, 191, 358, 101, 164, 133, 292, 206, 155)
13 10 100 11 (192, 211, 72, 234, 108, 159, 162, 228, 137, 162, 355)
14 100 100 11 (192, 211, 72, 234, 108, 159, 162, 228, 137, 162, 355)

From the beginning of the experiments, it
seemed that even change of the minimum standard
deviation does not change the number and
composition of clusters. The change occurred
between the values 0.005, 0.01, where the number
of clusters decreased from ten to seven. Another
increase in this parameter, then brought again
increase of the number of clusters.
This method of identifying clusters has provided
results, which at first glance appears to be
applicable. The output is a few clusters with an
acceptable number of objects.
As a last method was used 𝑘-means algorithm.
This procedure requires the knowledge of number of
clusters. The following table presents the results for
different numbers of clusters.

ISBN: 978-1-61804-113-5 175

 Advances in Applied Information Science

Table 3. Results of 𝑘-means method.

No. Number of clusters Frequency of individual clusters
1 3 737, 604, 679
2 4 493, 448, 584, 495
3 5 349, 344, 468, 435, 424
4 6 334, 298, 318, 382, 376, 312
5 7 281, 212, 275, 289, 406, 283, 274
6 8 216, 213, 319, 284, 306, 245, 206, 231
7 9 171, 192, 320, 193, 279, 251, 198, 196, 220
8 10 158, 172, 282, 211, 265, 207, 178, 190, 208, 149

With this method we have achieved clusters of
comparable size. However, it is difficult to
determine the number closest to reality. This is
already a task for an expert on the issue, which is
able to assess whether the clusters have meaning.
This also applies to the previous method.
set are only suitable methods EM and K-means, that
create useable (reasonable) clusters out of input
data. These methods can be used with advantage in
the preparatory phase of the subsequent application
of the methods for dealing with data classification
according to the set parameters [16] or [17].

6 Conclusion
As a tool for data analysis was chosen Weka
software. Weka (Waikato Environment for
Knowledge Analysis) is in Java written machine
learning tool, developed at the University of
Waikato, New Zealand. WEKA is freely available
software under the GNU General Public License.
Weka is a set of machine learning algorithms
designed for data mining tasks. Algorithms can be
applied directly to a data file, or you can call via our
own code written in Java. Weka contains tools for
preprocessing, classification, regression, clustering,
association rules and visualization. It is suitable also
for developing new machine learning schemes [15].
This whole case study was performed to obtain
information about the behavior of consumers in the
food market using the methods of cluster analysis.
The study dealt with the issue primarily in terms of
the suitability of selected methods for the type of
data.
The study concluded that the application of
cluster analysis on the number of such attributes is
possible, but not all types of methods are suitable
for this purpose. However, the results need to
consult an expert in consumer behavior, if the
results relevant. For this type of data would be
useful to test other approaches such as the creation
of association rules.
In the research of consumer behavior in the food
market was performed analysis of data by following
the methods of cluster analysis: DBSCAN,
HierarchicalClusterer, Expectation-Maximization,
K-means. The analysis shows that for a given data
References:
[1] Solomon, M. R. Consumer Behavior. Buying,
Having, and Being. Pearson Prenctice Hall.
Saddle River 2004, 621 s., ISBN: 0-13-123011-
5.
[2] Chalupová, N., Motyčka, A. Situation and
trends in trade-supporting information
technologies. In Acta Universitatis agriculture
et silviculture Mendelianae Brunensis. 2008,
LVI, no. 6, pp. 25-36. ISSN 1211-8516.
[3] Turčínková, J., Kalábová, J., Preferences of
Moravian consumers when buying food. Acta
Universitatis agriculture et silviculture
Mendelianae Brunensis. 2011. Vol. LIX, No. 2,
pp.371-376.
[4] Turčínková, J., Stávková, J., Stejskal, L.
Chování a rozhodování spotřebitele. 2007.
102 s. ISBN 978-80-7392-013-5.
[5] Munk, M., Kapusta, J., Švec, P., Turčáni, M.
2010. Data Advance Preparation Factors
Affecting Results of Sequence Rule Analysis in
Web Log Mining. In E & M Ekonomie a
Management. ISSN 1212-3609, 2010, vol. 13,
no. 4, p. 143-160.
[6] Řezanková, H., Húsek, D., Snášel, V. Shluková
analýza dat. Professional Publishing. Praha,
2007, 1. vyd., 196 s. ISBN 978-80-86946-26-9.
[7] Tan, P.-N., Steinbach, M., Kumar, V.
Introduction to Data Mining. Addison-Wesley.
2006. 769 s. ISBN 9780321321367.

ISBN: 978-1-61804-113-5 176

 Advances in Applied Information Science

[8] Han, J., Kamber, M. Data mining Concepts and

Techniques. Elsevier, Amsterdam. 2006. 2nd
edition, 770 s. ISBN 1-55860-901-6.
[9] Grabmeier, J., Rudolph, A. Techniques of
Cluster Algorithms in Data Mining. Proceedings
of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery,
Volume 6, Number 4, 2002. pp303-360, ISSN
1573-756X.
[10] Kaufman, L., Rousseeuw, P. J., Finding
Groups in Data: An Introduction to Cluster
Analysis. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New Jersey,
2005, 2nd edition, 342 s. ISBN 0-471-73578-7.
[11] Romesburg, H. C. Cluster Analysis For
Researchers, Lulu Press, North Carolina, 2004,
334 s., ISBN 1-4116-0617-5.
[12] Everitt, B. S., Landau, S., Leese, M.,
Cluster Analysis. Arnold, London, 2001, 4.
vydání, 237 s., ISBN 978-0-340-76119-9.
[13] Ester, M., Kriegel, H. Sander, J. Xu, X. A
density-based algorithn for discovering clusters
in large databases with noise. Proceedings of the
2nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on
Knoelwdge Discovery and Data Mining, AAAI
Press, Portland, 1996, 226-231.
[14] Munk, M., Drlík, M. 2011. Influence of
Different Session Timeouts Thresholds on
Results of Sequence Rule Analysis in
Educational Data Mining. In Communications in
Computer and Information Science. Springer,
ISSN 1865-0929, 2011, vol. 166, p. 60-74.
[15] Weka. Weka 3 - Data Mining with Open
Source Machine Learning Software in Java. [on-
line]. HTML Document. 2011. [cit. 2012-06-
16]. http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
[16] Turčínek, P., Šťastný, J., Motyčka, A.
Usage of Data Mining Techniques on Marketing
Research Data. In Proceedings of the 11th
WSEAS International Conference on Applied
Computer and Computational Science
(ACACOS '12). Rovaniemi, Finland, WSEAS
Press, 2012. p. 159-164. ISBN 978-1-61804-
084-8.
[17] Šťastný, J., Turčínek, P., Motyčka, A. Using
Neural Networks for Marketing Research Data
Classification. In International WSEAS
Conference on Mathematical Methods and
Techniques in Engeneering & Environmental
Science. Catania, Italy, WSEAS Press, 2011. p.
252-256. ISBN 978-1-61804-046-6.

ISBN: 978-1-61804-113-5 177

View publication stats