Mining the dominant patterns of customer shifts between segments by using top-k and distinguishing sequential rules

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to detect different behavioral groups and the dominant patterns of customer shifts between segments of different values over time. Design/methodology/approach – A new hybrid methodology is presented based on clustering techniques and mining top-k and distinguishing sequential rules. This methodology is implemented on the data of 14,772 subscribers of a mobile phone operator in Tehran, the capital of Iran. The main data include the call detail records and event detail records data that was acquired from the IT department of this operator. Findings – Seven different behavioral groups of customer shifts were identified. These groups and the corresponding top-k rules represent the dominant patterns of customer behavior. The results also explain the relation of customer switching behavior and segment instability, which is an open problem. Practical implications – The findings can be helpful to improve marketing strategies and decision making and for prediction purposes. The obtained rules are relatively easy to interpret and use; this can strengthen the practicality of results. Originality/value – A new hybrid methodology is proposed that systematically extracts the dominant patterns of customer shifts. This paper also offers a new definition and framework for discovering distinguishing sequential rules. Comparing with Markov chain models, this study captures the customer switching behavior in different levels of value through interpretable sequential rules. This is the first study that uses sequential and distinguishing rules in this domain.

Exploring the recollective experience during autobiographical memory retrieval in amnestic mild cognitive impairment

Autonoetic consciousness refers to the ability to mentally transport oneself back in subjective time to relive elements of, or all, of a past event, and is compromised in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Here, we investigate autobiographical memory (ABM) and the recollective experience in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). aMCI participants exhibited significant deficits compared with healthy elderly controls for both personal semantic and event detail components of ABM. These decrements were evident across all life epochs for episodic recall. Recall of an event that occurred 1 week previously, was tested in the same spatiotemporal context, and provided the greatest group dissociation, with elderly controls benefitting from a context-dependent memory effect. This reinstantiation of context did not ameliorate the anterograde deficits in the aMCI cohort, nor did it facilitate the mental reliving of these memories for either participant group. Whereas reliving judgments were comparable in both groups, aMCI participants exhibited a compromised capacity to generate vivid, self-referential visual imagery and to re-experience the original emotion of events. These contextual and experiential deficits extended beyond recently encountered events into remote epochs, and suggest a greater level of ABM impairment in aMCI than previously assumed. (JINS, 2010, 16, 546–555.)