The discovery of business chance from customer knowledge

The discovery of loyal customers at an early stage is extremely important in a highly competitive market in order to increase business chance. A loyal customer is defined as a customer who has brought high profit to a particular shop for a long period of time. A loyal customer has been identified in the conventional approach by measuring the sales volume or sales quantity for a certain period. However, such an approach is not effective to discover a loyal customer with high confidence and at an early stage. The purpose of this paper is to find an effective and robust rule to discover the future loyal customer from newcomers at an early stage with higher confidence, using the data mining tool, C5.0. The proposed approach is implemented by using real purchase data to observe the effectiveness.