Local PurTree Spectral Clustering for Massive Customer Transaction Data

The clustering of customer transaction data is very important to retail and e-commerce companies. The authors propose a local PurTree spectral clustering algorithm for massive customer transaction data that uses a purchase tree to represent customer transaction data and a PurTree distance to compute the distance between two trees. The new method learns a data similarity matrix from the local distances and the level weights in the PurTree distance simultaneously. An iterative optimization algorithm is proposed to optimize the proposed model. The authors conducted experiments to compare their method with four commonly used clustering method for transaction data on six real-life datasets. The experimental results show that the new method outperformed other clustering algorithms.