EconBase
← All papers

Extracting Complements and Substitutes from Sales Data: A Network Perspective

Yu Tian, Sebastian Lautz, Alisdiar O. G. Wallis, Renaud Lambiotte

arXiv 1 Mar 2021 · cs.SI · 1 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2103.02042 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

The complementarity and substitutability between products are essential concepts in retail and marketing. Qualitatively, two products are said to be substitutable if a customer can replace one product by the other, while they are complementary if they tend to be bought together. In this article, we take a network perspective to help automatically identify complements and substitutes from sales transaction data. Starting from a bipartite product-purchase network representation, with both transaction nodes and product nodes, we develop appropriate null models to infer significant relations, either complements or substitutes, between products, and design measures based on random walks to quantify their importance. The resulting unipartite networks between products are then analysed with community detection methods, in order to find groups of similar products for the different types of relationships. The results are validated by combining observations from a real-world basket dataset with the existing product hierarchy, as well as a large-scale flavour compound and recipe dataset.

Citation extraction

49
references
66
in-text mentions
49
distinct cited
0
self-citations
12,383
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 68% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1F. Ruiz, S. Athey, and D. Blei, “SHOPPER: a probabilistic model of c… (2020) SHOPPER: a probabilistic model of consumer choice with substitutes and complements0.92843100%
2F. Chen, X. Liu, D. Proserpio, I. Troncoso, and F. Xiong, “Studying… (2020) Studying product competition using representation learning0.73732100%
3Y. Ahn, S. Ahnert, J. Bagrow, and A. Barabási, “Flavor network and t… (2011) Flavor network and the principles of food pairing0.64422100%
4S. Athey and S. Stern, “An empirical framework for testing theories… (1998) An empirical framework for testing theories about complementarity in orgaziational design0.64422100%
5L. Le Cam, “An approximation theorem for the poisson binomial distri… (1960) An approximation theorem for the poisson binomial distribution0.5113233%
6R. Hastie, T. Tibshirani and J. Friedman, “Unsupervised learning,” i… (2009) Unsupervised learning0.5112250%
7M. Newman, “The configuration model,” in Networks, New York: Oxford… (2018) The configuration model0.5112250%
8M. Newman, S. Strogatz, and D. Watts, “Random graph with arbitrary d… (2001) Random graph with arbitrary degree distributions and their applications0.5112250%
9A. Kök, M. Fisher, and R. Vaidyanathan, “Assortment planning: Review… (2015) Assortment planning: Review of literature and industry practice0.51121100%
10T. Zhou, J. Ren, M. Medo, and Y. Zhang, “Bipartite network projectio… (2007) Bipartite network projection and personal recommendation0.51121100%

Showing the top 10 of 49 scored citations.