Editorial: Data Mining in Electronic Commerce - Support vs. Confidence

in the data mining technique, association rules. This article was presented at a conference and never formally published [22]. In the last four years this article has been downloaded nearly twenty-thousand times from an open access repository. This interest by researchers and practitioners has motivated us to write this technical editorial. The structure of this editorial will be as follows. In this section we briefly introduce data mining and electronic commerce. In the following section we describe different data mining techniques. In the final section we discuss the effect of support versus confidence in association rules technique applied to electronic commerce. The data mining process involves searching, selecting, exploring, and modeling large amounts of data to uncover previously unknown patterns that are potentially useful, and ultimately comprehensible information, from large databases. Its goal is to manipulate data into knowledge ([15], [18]-[19], [31], [33]). Pattern extraction is an important process of any data mining technique and it refers to the relationships between subsets of data. Data mining use different families of computational, statistical and machine learning methods that include statistical analysis, decision trees, neural networks, rule induction and refinement, and graphic visualization among others, to exhaustively explore data to reveal complex relationships that may exist. Although machine learning techniques have been available for a long time, the development of advanced and user friendly tools for business intelligence [25] has made data mining more attractive and practical for organizations. When these pattern extraction techniques are used correctly, they can be effective tools for extracting useful information from data [35]. The recent wide use of data mining has been due to several factors. The most obvious of these is the large amounts of data that organizations collect during operational transactions. In the early 90s, credit and insurance companies began using data mining as a means of detecting fraud [28]. Most organizations, irrespective of the industry type, have some form of operational process in which they collect large amounts of data. For example, the retail industry has been using data mining techniques for years to predict what their customers are likely to purchase. The electronic commerce industry was one of the latest to use data mining technology [18]. Electronic commerce is the use of information and communication technologies through the Internet platform to share business information, keep business relationships, and conduct business transactions. In electronic commerce, different data mining techniques can be used for many purposes. For example, in sales promotion the marketing staff may want to find out which products their customers are more likely to buy together. This information will allow them to place these items in a sales bundle in order to increase revenue ([2], [31]). The use of Web log data permits to understand users' behavior. This data contains information about users' access and may show potential patterns in their behavior, and identify potential customers of electronic commerce. This knowledge is useful to: change marketing strategies; identify segmentation of customers; improve customers' retention; predict customer's expenditure and market trends; provide personalized services to customers; analyze shopping cart; forecast sales; redesign the website to provide a better service; and/or make better business decisions. This area of data mining has given rise to Web mining, a technique that can be subdivided into Web content mining; Web structure mining; and Web usage mining ([7], [24]). These techniques are also used to extract useful information from Web documents or Web services [5] and are widely used in a variety of applications. As we describe above, data mining and specifically web data mining technology plays an important role in electronic commerce. In recent years with the rapid growth of electronic commerce and the large amounts of data collected through operational transactions, data mining techniques are becoming more useful to discover and understand unknown customer patterns. In the following paragraphs we briefly describe some examples of the application of data mining in electronic commerce. Clustering or grouping electronic commerce customers with similar browsing behaviors permit the identification of their common characteristics, providing a better understanding of customers with the aim of giving them a more appropriate, and personalized service. When a vendor knows the customer's needs and interests, they can work on providing a better service and keeping the customer relationship with the vendor.