Profit Mining

A major obstacle in data mining applications is the gap between the statistic-based pattern extraction and the value-based decision-making. “Profit mining” aims to reduce this gap. In profit mining, given a set of past transactions and pre-determined target items, we like to build a model for recommending target items and promotion strategies to new customers, with the goal of maximizing profit. Though this problem is studied in the context of retailing environment, the concept and techniques are applicable to other applications under a general notion of “utility”. In this short article, we review existing techniques and briefly describe the profit mining approach recently proposed by the authors. The reader is referred to (Wang, Zhou & Han, 2002) for the details.