Application of Bayesian Network Sheds Light on Purchase Decision Process Basing on RFID Technology

Recently, a wireless non-contact technology named RFID(Radio Frequency Identification) has brought a new perspective on process of purchase decision. Via the RFID tag attached to a shopping cart, the position information of customers in a grocery store can be captured every moment. This paper presents our study based on this type of data. In this study, we transform the RFID data into stay time that the customers spend in supermarket until purchase is decided. In addition to RFID data, a purchase transaction based on POS(Point of Sale) data that only represent the point when customers come to purchase can be extended to a process of in-store behavior. As a probabilistic graphical model named bayesian network is employed to applied, we investigate the stay time how to affect the purchase probability. In the experiment, we also reveal that this affect is different during the purchase decision process by customers in individual age bracket. Moreover, numerical results show our proposal has a better accuracy than other models such as logistic regression analysis.