《Marketing Segmentation Using Support Vector Clustering》.pdf

Expert Systems with Applications Expert Systems with Applications 32 (2007) 313–317 /locate/eswa Marketing segmentation using support vector clustering Jih-Jeng Huang a, Gwo-Hshiung Tzeng b,c,*, Chorng-Shyong Ong a a Department of Information Management, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan b Institute of Management of Technology, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 Ta-Hsueh Road, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan c Department of Business Administration, Kainan University, Taoyuan, Taiwan Abstract Marketing segmentation is widely used for targeting a smaller market and is useful for decision makers to reach all customers effec- tively with one basic marketing mix. Although several clustering algorithms have been proposed to deal with marketing segmentation problems, a soundly method seems to be limited. In this paper, support vector clustering (SVC) is used for marketing segmentation. A case study of a drink company is used to demonstrate the proposed method and compared with the k-means and the self-organizing feature map (SOFM) methods. On the basis of the numerical results, we can conclude that SVC outperforms the other methods in mar- keting segmentation. 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Keywords: Marketing segmentation; Clustering algorithms; Support vector clustering (SVC); k-means; Self-organizing feature map (SOFM) 1. Introduction tively and effici