Domain driven data mining for customer demand discovery

Understanding customer demands is the foundation of businesses to make strategies for product development, product promotion and customer relationship management. Therefore, how to discover the objects of customers´ demands becomes a critical task for business. Data mining is an important way to analyze and understand customer demands, behaviors and characteristics from large business databases However, traditional data mining is data-driven, therefore discovered patterns can be hardly understood or common sense for managers. To this end, the paper proposes domain driven data mining to tackle the above issues. Firstly, the paper constructs customer demand domain ontology and customer demand discovery task ontology. Further, the paper provides ontology based data mining framework, which is implemented for mining customer data from the case firm and knowledge extraction from data mining results is illustrated as knowledge patterns and rules. Our study provides a roadmap for businesses to conduct customer demand data mining and facilitate decision making and customer relationship management.