Showing posts with label Machine Learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Machine Learning. Show all posts

Friday, June 12

Customer Segmentation using Machine Learning

When you get tons of unlabeled data and you want to find some pattern in data to be used for some purpose like segmenting the data on basis of certain characteristics machine learning algorithm can be a big help. Lets take a example of tons of customer data of Target or Amazon or Flipcart. 

To use this data for building some value added service like recommendation engine or showing customer latest treds that he might be interested in or even showing ads that are most appropriate for customer based on his gender, age, location etc we need to first classify the customer into different segments. 

According to a Forrester report, only 33% of companies using customer segmentation find it significantly impactful. The main reason companies fail is that they are still using traditional customer segmentation approaches, without leveraging the breadth of customer data and advanced analytics techniques available today.

What is Customer Segmentation?

Customer Segmentation is one the most important applications of unsupervised learning. Using clustering techniques, companies can identify the several segments of customers allowing them to target the potential user base. In this machine learning project, we will make use of K-means clustering which is the essential algorithm for clustering unlabeled dataset. Before ahead in this project, learn what actually customer segmentation is.

What is Behavioral Segmentation?

Traditional approaches to segmentation focused mainly on who customers are and segments were based on demographic attributes such as gender or age, and firmographic attributes like company size or industry. But just understanding who your customers are is not enough anymore.  Behavioral segmentation is about understanding customers not just by who they are, but by what they do, using insights derived from customers’ actions.

Behavioral Segmentation is a form of customer segmentation that is based on patterns of behavior displayed by customers as they interact with a company/brand or make a purchasing decision. It allows businesses to divide customers into groups according to their knowledge of, attitude towards, use of, or response to a product, service or brand.

Why Segment Customers by Behavior?

Here are four main advantages of grouping customers into different segments based on their behaviors:

  1. Higher Level Of Personalization. Understand how different groups of customers should be targeted with different offers, at the most appropriate times through their preferred channels, to effectively help them advance towards successful outcomes in their journeys.
  2. Behaviourial  Predictivity. Use historical behavioral patterns to predict and influence future customer behaviors and outcomes.
  3. Customer Prioritization. Make smarter decisions on how to best allocate time, budget and resources by identifying high-value customer segments and initiatives with the greatest potential business impact.
  4. Evaluating Segment Performance. Monitor growth patterns and changes in key customer segments over time to gauge business health and track performance against goals. At a high level, this means quantifying the size and value of customer segments, and tracking how “positive” and “negative” segments are growing or shrinking over time.

Tuesday, August 30

Begining Your Data Science Journey

https://cdn.analyticsvidhya.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/machine-.png

There are tons of data science resources but we often get confused on which resources to follow. I am sharing some steps I followed to learn data science on my own as a beginner. You can also check the links at the end of the article your learning and getting hands-on experience in Data Science.

Programming Language is must to start with Data Science

Whether you are a programmer or new to programming the first step while starting the Data Science Journey is to know programming language. Python is the most preferred coding language and is adopted by most Data Scientists. It is easy to understand, versatile, and Python supports various in-built libraries such as Numpy, Pandas, MatplotLib, Seaborn, Scipy, and many more. The 2nd preferred language for data science is R. Both Python and R learning resources are freely available on internet.

Learning SQL is important when you are working with data

Most programmers are expert on SQL and have worked with 1 or more databases. Structured Query Language (SQL) is used for extracting and communicating with large databases. When you are working with tons of data it is important to know how SQL is used to store & query data. You should have a good understanding of normalization, writing nested queries, group-by, performing join operations, etc., on the data and extract in raw format. This data is then processed using Python , R or any other library.

Cleaning Data is an important step of data processing

When a Data Scientist starts work on a project he has to deal with raw data which is not clean and can't be used for meaningful operations. One has to learn which libraries to use for cleaning the data set, removing unwanted values, formatting data to required format, handling missing values and purging unwanted data. It can be achieved by using some inbuilt python libraries like Pandas and Numpy.
When the data volume is small we can use MS Excel to process the data but Excel has limitations of volume and NOSQL and RDBMS database are used for storing volume data.

 Data Analysis is performed on cleansed data

Exploratory data analysis is the essential part when talking about data science. The data scientist has many tasks, including finding data patterns, analyzing data, finding the appropriate trends in the data and obtaining valuable insights, etc., from them with the help of various graphical and statistical methods, including:

A) Data Analysis using Pandas and Numpy
B) Data Manipulation
C) Data Visualization

You can learn basics of Exploratory Data Analysis from this blog posted by Prasad Patil  

What is Exploratory Data Analysis?

Learning Machine Learning 

According to Google, “Machine learning is a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building. It is a branch of artificial intelligence based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention.”

Here is the list of commonly used machine learning algorithms. These algorithms can be applied to almost any data problem:

  1. Linear Regression
  2. Logistic Regression
  3. Decision Tree
  4. SVM
  5. Naive Bayes
  6. kNN
  7. K-Means
  8. Random Forest
  9. Dimensionality Reduction Algorithms
  10. Gradient Boosting algorithms

Some Useful Links

 

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