Product Purchase Sequence Analyses By Using Horizontal Data Sorting Technique

Horizontal data sorting is a very useful SAS ® technique in advanced data analysis using SAS programming. Three years ago (Paper 376-2013), we presented and illustrated various methods and approaches to perform horizontal data sorting, and demonstrated its valuable application in strategic data reporting. However, this technique can also be employed as a creative analytic method in advanced business analytics. This paper presents and discusses its innovative and insightful applications in product purchase sequence analyses, such as product opening sequence analysis, product affinity analysis, next best offer analysis, time span analysis etc. Compared to other analytic approaches, horizontal data sorting technique has the distinct advantages of being straightforward, simple, convenient to use and producing easy-to-interpret analytic results. Therefore the technique can have a wide variety of applications in customer data analysis and business analytics fields. INTRODUCTION Sorting and ordering data are fundamental skills in SAS® data analysis. Data sorting can be vertical sorting, across rows, or horizontal sorting, across columns. Compared to vertical sort, horizontal sort is used less frequently, and it requires the user to employ multiple sophisticated SAS skills such as Transpose, Rotate, Array, Macro, etc. Utilization of this technique can significantly enhance the format and layout of data reporting, and thus provide informative insights into data. For example, in a cross-sell marketing campaign, we have customers’ purchase data as shown in Table 1. The arrangement of products and purchase quantities is not in a defined order, which makes it very inconvenient for us to look up or compare. Table 1. Sample Raw Purchase Data of A Cross-Sell Campaign Client ID Product 1 Qty Product 2 Qty Product 3 Qty Product 4 Qty 101 Printer 10 Computer 25 Games 6 Software 8 107 TV 17 Software 32 Fax Machine 11 216 Clothes 16 Book 53 Phone 9 Glass Ware 24 As illustrated in Table 2, a better way of reporting the purchase data is to sort and present the data in a descending sequence of the purchase quantity. This kind of data sorting is horizontal data sorting because it sorts data horizontally across table columns or data set variables. As can be seen from Table 2, this horizontal sorting and presentation of data will not only make the report easy to read, much more important, it also provides insights into customers’ purchase tendency and preferences. Therefore, horizontal data sorting is a very useful SAS technique in insightful and strategic reporting of customer and business data. Table 2. Horizontally Sorted Purchase Data: Order By Descending Purchase Quantity. Client ID Product 1 Qty Product 2 Qty Product 3 Qty Product 4 Qty 101 Computer 25 Printer 10 Software 8 Games 6 107 Software 32 TV 17 Fax Machine 11 216 Book 53 Glass Ware 24 Clothes 16 Phone 9