Application of data mining in supply chain management

Dealing with the very large database in supply chain management is a very important problem. Mining association rules and sequential patterns from large database has been recognized by many researchers in database systems and many other related management areas. In this paper, the research on data mining of supply chain is first introduced, then the four stages of the implementation of data mining are given. Many previous works focus on mining association rules in transaction database and sequential patterns at a single concept level, but there exists many phenomena of multiple level sequence patterns in practice. An effective multiple sequence patterns mining algorithm is presented in this paper. Finally, a case study is discussed.