A Data mining approach for finding optimal discount of retail assortments

Due to the recent competition in the retailing industry, retailers are striving to improve their operations in order to run their stores more efficiently. One of the most important factors that encourages customers to buy products is discount. The effects of discount on sales have rarely been dealt with academically. Moreover, in few previous researches in this case, the temporal characteristics of product discount have not been noticed. The problem addressed in this paper is the consideration of products´ discounts in discovering association rules in different time intervals that a specific discount appears on a specific product and finding optimal discount for each product with the aim of maximizing total profits. Additionally, experiments on real world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.