Distributed customer behavior prediction using multiplex data: A collaborative MK-SVM approach

In the customer-centered marketplace, the understanding of customer behavior is a critical success factor. The big databases in an organization usually involve multiplex data such as static, time series, symbolic sequential and textual data which are separately stored in different databases of different sections. It poses a challenge to traditional centralized customer behavior prediction. In this study, a novel approach called collaborative multiple kernel support vector machine (C-MK-SVM) is developed for distributed customer behavior prediction using multiplex data. The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is used for the global optimization of the distributed sub-models in C-MK-SVM. Computational experiments on a practical retail dataset are reported. Computational results show that C-MK-SVM exhibits better customer behavior prediction performance and higher computational speed than support vector machine and multiple kernel support vector machine. 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.