Cross Selling and predicting quantity sold?

Tech Tip: Click here to run a free scan for Windows Errors and optimize PC performance

I've done a lot of web research and read a book on analysis services but still haven't found an example of how to develop a cross selling algorithm that can predict not only what is sold, but how much is predicted to be sold.

For instance,
If I know customer A has bought 5 units of item 1, 10 units of item 2, and 20 units of item 3, I may know there is a 50% chance they will also want to but item 4.

Is there any way to determine how much of item 4 they might buy?

For instnace, say Item 4 is batteries and Item1 is a clock radio. We know that if they buy one clock radio they are likley to buy 2 batteries, but if they buy 2 clock radios they are likley to buy 4 batteries, not 2. In each case, there is the same likleyhood that they buy at least some batteries.

If my data set looks like this (in my sales table)
Customer / Item / Quantity

How do I design the data mining model to account for quantity? I tried several approaches to this and can't seem to get it to work correctly when taking quantity into account.

The method I used takes the sale table and makes it a case table and nested table, treats the Customer from the cast table as a key, and the item from the nested table as a key, input, and predict. This is how the books I've read explain how to create a cross selling model. I don't understand how I make it take quantity of each item into account.

Would it be better to do this in a 2nd mining model and not use it in the cross selling model?

Thanks
Tom

.

Relevant Pages

  • RE: Cross Selling and predicting quantity sold?
    ... I've done a lot of web research and read a book on analysis services but still haven't found an example of how to develop a cross selling algorithm that can predict not only what is sold, but how much is predicted to be sold. ... How do I design the data mining model to account for quantity? ... I tried several approaches to this and can't seem to get it to work correctly when taking quantity into account. ...
    (microsoft.public.sqlserver.datamining)
  • Re: Cross Selling and predicting quantity sold?
    ... say Item 4 is batteries and Item1 is a clock radio. ... How do I design the data mining model to account for quantity? ... books I've read explain how to create a cross selling model. ...
    (microsoft.public.sqlserver.datamining)