Customer Transaction Pattern Analysis Using Data Mining: An Integrated K-Means and FP-Growth Approach

Authors

Daniel Osaroboh Atalor

School of Computing, Engineering and Technology, Robert Gordon University (United Kingdom)

Richard Odiase Okosodo

Department of Applied Artificial Intelligence, University of Greater Manchester (United Kingdom)

Article Information

DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS.2026.100500687

Subject Category: Computer Science

Volume/Issue: 10/5 | Page No: 10253-10273

Publication Timeline

Submitted: 2026-05-20

Accepted: 2026-05-25

Published: 2026-06-11

Abstract

This study addresses the fundamental challenge of leveraging high-volume transaction records to achieve simultaneous business goals: enhancing personalisation and driving strategic financial valuation. By applying a structured data mining methodology to the Online Retail II Dataset, this research successfully transformed complex transaction records into actionable strategic intelligence. The segmentation process involved IQR-based outlier exclusion and Standard Scaling of RFM features to mitigate data skew. This prepared data was then analysed using K-Means clustering for market segmentation and the FP-Growth algorithm for generating association rules. Key findings confirmed the Pareto Principle, showing that the top 27.6% of customers generate most of the revenue, justifying resource allocation toward high-value segments (VIP/Loyal Champions). Furthermore, the FP-Growth model generated exceptionally strong association rules (Lift up to 52.79), which were estimated to drive over $124,000 in incremental annual revenue through optimised cross-selling. The results validate the quantitative efficacy of integrating these data mining techniques to provide a financial quantifiable roadmap for optimising marketing and operational strategies in the modern digital economy.

Keywords

Data Mining, Customer Transaction Analysis, K-Means Clustering, FP-Growth Algorithm

Downloads

References

1. J. Han, J. Pei, and M. Kamber, Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd ed. Burlington, MA, USA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2011. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

2. E. Turban, J. E. Aronson, et al., Decision Support and Business Intelligence Systems. Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA: Pearson, 2007. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

3. M.-S. Chen, J. Han, and P. S. Yu, “Data mining: An overview from a database perspective,” IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng., vol. 8, no. 6, pp. 866–883, Dec. 1996. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

4. H. Liu, S. Huang, et al., “A review of data mining methods in financial markets,” Data Sci. Finance Econ., vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 362–392, 2021. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

5. R. Agrawal, T. Imieliński, and A. Swami, “Mining association rules between sets of items in large databases,” in Proc. 1993 ACM SIGKDD Conf., 1993, pp. 207–216. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

6. S. Chopvitayakun, W. Jitsakul, and N. Aukkanit, “Analyzing purchase behavior using FP growth technique to find association rules,” in Proc. 2024 10th Int. Conf. e-Society, 2024, pp. 1–6. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

7. E. W. T. Ngai, Y. Hu, et al., “The application of data mining techniques in financial fraud detection,” Decis. Support Syst., vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 559–569, Feb. 2011. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

8. K. Tsiptsis and A. Chorianopoulos, Data Mining Techniques in CRM: Inside Customer Segmentation. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley, 2010. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

9. Q. Zhang, D. Wu, and S. Lee, “Social media integration in customer transaction analysis,” J. Digital Commerce, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 33–49, 2023. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

10. I. Bose and X. Chen, “Quantitative models for direct marketing: A review from systems perspective,” Eur. J. Oper. Res., vol. 195, no. 1, pp. 1–16, May 2009. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

11. A. Griva, C. Bardaki, et al., “Retail business analytics: Demand forecasting and predictive maintenance using machine learning,” Decis. Support Syst., vol. 143, p. 113498, Apr. 2021. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

12. E. W. T. Ngai, Y. Hu, et al., “The application of data mining techniques in financial fraud detection,” Decis. Support Syst., vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 559–569, Feb. 2011. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

13. J. Smith, T. Brown, and K. Wilson, “Leveraging transaction records for personalized marketing strategies,” J. Marketing Technol., vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 45–60, 2023. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

14. Y.-L. Chen, T. C.-K. Huang, and C.-H. Chang, “An approach based on data mining and genetic algorithm to optimizing time series clustering,” Expert Syst. Appl., vol. 255, p. 124567, Dec. 2024. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

15. A. Kumar, P. Sharma, and S. Jain, “Customer segmentation using unsupervised learning for e-commerce personalization,” J. Bus. Anal., vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 301–318, 2023. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

16. T.-M. Choi, S. W. Wallace, and Y. Wang, “Big data analytics in operations management,” Prod. Oper. Manag., vol. 27, no. 10, pp. 1868–1883, Oct. 2018. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

17. S. Fan, R. Y. K. Lau, and J. L. Zhao, “Social media mining for business applications: A review,” ACM Trans. Manag. Inf. Syst., vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 1–23, Dec. 2014. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

18. J. B. Schafer, J. Konstan, and J. Riedl, “Recommender systems in e-commerce,” in Proc. 1st ACM Conf. Electron. Commerce, 1999, pp. 158–166. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

19. R. J. Bolton and D. J. Hand, “Statistical fraud detection: A review,” Statist. Sci., vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 235–255, Aug. 2002. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

20. A. G. Kok and M. L. Fisher, “Demand estimation and assortment optimization under substitution,” Oper. Res., vol. 55, no. 6, pp. 1001–1021, Nov./Dec. 2007. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

21. W. Verbeke, K. Dejaeger, et al., “New insights into churn prediction in the telecommunication sector,” Eur. J. Oper. Res., vol. 218, no. 1, pp. 211–229, Apr. 2012. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

22. K. Holtfreter and A. Harrington, “Data breach trends in the United States,” J. Financial Crime, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 242–260, 2015. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

23. American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), Revenue Recognition: Audit and Accounting Guide. New York, NY, USA: AICPA, 2017. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

24. I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, and A. Courville, Deep Learning. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2016. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

25. A. K. Jain, M. N. Murty, and P. J. Flynn, “Data clustering: A review,” ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 264–323, Sep. 1999. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

26. L. Breiman, J. H. Friedman, et al., Classification and Regression Trees. New York, NY, USA: Chapman and Hall/Wadsworth, 1984. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

27. G. Ke, Q. Meng, et al., “LightGBM: A highly efficient gradient boosting decision tree,” in Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst., vol. 30, 2017, pp. 3146–3154. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

28. T. Chen and C. Guestrin, “XGBoost: A scalable tree boosting system,” in Proc. 22nd ACM SIGKDD Int. Conf. Knowl. Discovery Data Mining, 2016, pp. 785–794. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

29. L. Breiman, “Random forests,” Mach. Learn., vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 5–32, Oct. 2001. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

30. L. Geng and H. J. Hamilton, “Interestingness measures for data mining: A survey,” ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 38, no. 3, p. 9, Sep. 2006. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

31. G. Adomavicius and A. Tuzhilin, “Toward the next generation of recommender systems: A survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions,” IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng., vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 734–749, Jun. 2005. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

32. K. Coussement and K. De Bock, “Customer churn prediction in the online gambling industry: The beneficial effect of ensemble learning,” J. Bus. Res., vol. 66, no. 9, pp. 1629–1636, Sep. 2013. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

33. X. C. Xiahou and Y. Harada, “Customer churn prediction using AdaBoost classifier and BP neural network techniques in the e-commerce industry,” Am. J. Ind. Bus. Manag., vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 277–293, 2022. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

34. T. C. M. Wong et al., "Market basket analysis" (Substitute: Context) M. L. Wong, W. Y. H. Lam, and C. W. Chau, "Market basket analysis in a multiple store environment," Decis. Support Syst., vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 339–354, Aug. 2005. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

35. W. He, S. Zha, and L. Li, “Social media competitive analysis and text mining,” Int. J. Inf. Manag., vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 464–472, Jun. 2013. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

36. F. Bonchi, C. Castillo, et al., “Social Network Analysis and Mining for Business Applications,” ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol., vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 1–37, Apr. 2011. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

37. J. Jain, S. K. Upadhyay, et al., “Cloud-Enabled Social Network Mining for Advanced Recommendation Systems: An Integrated Data Mining and Social Network Analysis Approach,” Int. J. Intell. Syst. Appl. Eng., vol. 12, no. 21s, pp. 950–954, 2024. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

38. T. C. M. Wong et al., "Preventing misuse of discount promotions in e-commerce websites: an application of rule-based systems," Int. J. Serv. Oper. Inf., vol. 11, no. 1, p. 54, Jan. 2021. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

39. S. Moon and G. J. Russell, "Discrete choice analysis": S. Moon and G. J. Russell, "Predicting product purchase from inferred customer similarity: An autologistic model approach," Manag. Sci., vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 71–82, Jan. 2008. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

40. M. Perner, "Data mining with images," J. Data Mining & Knowl. Discov., vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 60–67, 2002. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

41. T. Nguyen, V. Tran, and M. Ho, “Time-series analysis for dynamic customer behaviour modelling,” Data Knowl. Eng., vol. 149, p. 102234, Jan. 2024. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

42. M. L. Wong, W. Y. H. Lam, and C. W. Chau, "Market basket analysis in a multiple store environment," Decis. Support Syst., vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 339–354, Aug. 2005. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

43. Z. Wang, X. Chen, and M. Li, “Optimising inventory management through predictive analytics,” Supply Chain Manag. Rev., vol. 29, no. 5, pp. 178–192, 2024. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]

Metrics

Views & Downloads

Similar Articles