Customer segmentation of retail chain customers using cluster analysis

Sammanfattning: In this thesis, cluster analysis was applied to data comprising of customer spending habits at a retail chain in order to perform customer segmentation. The method used was a two-step cluster procedure in which the first step consisted of feature engineering, a square root transformation of the data in order to handle big spenders in the data set and finally principal component analysis in order to reduce the dimensionality of the data set. This was done to reduce the effects of high dimensionality. The second step consisted of applying clustering algorithms to the transformed data. The methods used were K-means clustering, Gaussian mixture models in the MCLUST family, t-distributed mixture models in the tEIGEN family and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). For the NMF clustering a slightly different data pre-processing step was taken, specifically no PCA was performed. Clustering partitions were compared on the basis of the Silhouette index, Davies-Bouldin index and subject matter knowledge, which revealed that K-means clustering with K = 3 produces the most reasonable clusters. This algorithm was able to separate the customer into different segments depending on how many purchases they made overall and in these clusters some minor differences in spending habits are also evident. In other words there is some support for the claim that the customer segments have some variation in their spending habits.