We looked into affinity analysis to demystify shopping behavior patterns in supermarkets. Although the roots of association rule learning are in analyzing point-of-sale transactions, they can be applied outside the retail industry to find relationships among other types of baskets. The notion of a basket can easily be extended to services and products, for example, to analyze items purchased using a credit card, such as rental cars and hotel rooms, and to analyze information on value-added services purchased by telecom customers (call waiting, call forwarding, DSL, speed call, and so on), which can help the operators determine the ways to improve their bundling of service packages.

Additionally, we will look into the following examples of potential cross industry applications:

• Medical diagnosis
• Protein sequences
• Census data
• Customer relationship management
• IT operations analytics