Data mining investigation of co-movements on the Taiwan and China stock markets for future investment portfolio

On June 29, 2010, Taiwan signed an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China as a major step to open markets between Taiwan and China. Thus, the ECFA will contribute by creating a closer relationship between China and Taiwan through economic and market interactions. Co-movements of the world’s national financial market indexes are a popular research topic in the finance literature. Some studies examine the co-movements and the benefits of international financial market portfolio diversification/integration and economic performance. Thus, this study investigates the co-movement in the Taiwan and China (Hong Kong) stock markets under the ECFA using a data mining approach, including association rules and clustering analysis. Thirty categories of stock indexes are implemented as decision variables to observe the behavior of stock index associations during the periods of ECFA implementation. Patterns, rules, and clusters of data mining results are discussed for future stock market investment portfolio.     

Mining demand chain knowledge of life insurance market for new product development

Demand chain management (DCM) can be defined as “extending the view of operations from a single business unit or a company to the whole chain. Essentially, demand chain management focuses not only on generating drawing power from customers to purchase merchandises on the supply chain; but also on exploring satisfaction, participation, and involvement from customers in order for enterprises to understand customer needs and wants. Thus, customers have changed their position in the demand chain to assume a leading role in bringing more benefit for enterprises. This article investigates what functionalities best fit the consumers’ needs and wants for life insurance products by extracting specific knowledge patterns and rules from consumers and their demand chain. By doing so, this paper uses the a priori algorithm and clustering analysis as methodologies for data mining. Knowledge extraction from data mining results is illustrated as market segments and demand chain analysis on life insurance market in Taiwan in order to propose suggestions and solutions to the insurance firms for new product development and marketing.     

Classification knowledge discovery in mold tooling test using decision tree algorithm

The scale of Taiwan’s mold industry was ranked the sixth in the world. But, under the global competitive pressure, Taiwan has lost its competitive advantage gradually. The only chance of Taiwan’s mold industry lies in improving the competitive abilities in product research, development and design. In mold manufacturing cycle, mold tooling test plays a very important role at accelerating the speed of production. An experienced engineer can minimize the error rate of mold tooling test according to his rich experiences in parameter adjustment. However, this experience is mostly implicit without theoretical basis and its knowledge is difficult to be transmitted. Benefiting from the well development of data mining technologies, this study aimed at constructing an intelligent classification knowledge discovery system for mold tooling test based on decision tree algorithm, so as to explore and accumulate the experimental knowledge for the use of Taiwan’s mold industry. This study took the only high-alloy steel manufacturer in Taiwan for case study, and performed system validation with 66 record data. The results showed the accuracy rates of prediction of training data and testing data are 97.6 and 86.9%, respectively. In addition, this study explored two classification knowledge rules and proposed concrete proposals for tooling test parameter adjustment. Moreover, this study provided two ways, rule verification and effectiveness comparison of four mining algorithms, to conduct model verification. The experimental results showed the decision tree algorithm has an excellent discriminatory power of classification and is able to provide clear and simple reference rules for decisions.     

Ontology-based data mining approach implemented on exploring product and brand spectrum

In physics, a spectrum is, the series of colored bands diffracted and arranged in the order of their respective wave lengths by the passage of white light through a prism or other diffracting medium. Outside of physics, a spectrum is a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary infinitely within a continuum. In commerce, an effective visualization tool, especially for stakeholders or managers, is a brand spectrum diagram highlighting where the company’s brands and products are situated compared to other competitors. This paper investigates the research issues on product and brand spectrum in the beverage product market of Taiwan, which proposes using the Apriori algorithm of association rules, and clustering analysis based on an ontology-based data mining approach, for mining customer and product knowledge from the database. Knowledge extracted from data-mining results is illustrated as knowledge patterns, rules, and maps in order to propose suggestions and solutions to beverage firms for possible product development, promotion, and marketing.     

Mining customer knowledge for electronic catalog marketing

Direct marketing is the use of the telephone and non-personal media to communicate product and organizational information to customers, who then can purchase products via mail, telephone, or the Internet. In contrast, catalog marketing is a type of marketing in which an organization provides a catalog from which customers make selections and place orders by mail or telephone. However, most catalogs for retailing firms are presented to customers in the format of paper catalogs without strategic segmentation design and implementation. In this regard, electronic catalog design and marketing could be a method to integrate the Internet and catalog marketing using market segmentation in order to enhance the effectiveness of direct marketing and sales management in retailing. This paper uses data mining based on association rules from relational database design and implementation for mining customer knowledge. As result, marketing knowledge patterns and rules are extracted for the electronic catalog marketing and sales management of a retailing mall in Taiwan.     

Ontology-based data mining approach implemented for sport marketing

Since sport marketing is a commercial activity, precise customer and marketing segmentation must be investigated frequently and it would help to know the sport market after a specific customer profile, segmentation, or pattern come with marketing activities has found. Such knowledge would not only help sport firms, but would also contribute to the broader field of sport customer behavior and marketing. This paper proposes using the Apriori algorithm of association rules, and clustering analysis based on an ontology-based data mining approach, for mining customer knowledge from the database. Knowledge extracted from data mining results is illustrated as knowledge patterns, rules, and maps in order to propose suggestions and solutions to the case firm, Taiwan Adidas, for possible product promotion and sport marketing.     

Product development with data mining techniques: A case on design of digital camera

Many enterprises have been devoting a significant portion of their budget to product development in order to distinguish their products from those of their competitors and to make them better fit the needs and wants of customers. Hence, businesses should develop product designing that could satisfy the customers’ requirements since this will increase the enterprise’s competitiveness and it is an essential criterion to earning higher loyalties and profits. This paper investigates the following research issues in the development of new digital camera products: (1) What exactly are the customers’ “needs” and “wants” for digital camera products? (2) What features is more importance than others? (3) Can product design and planning for product lines/product collection be integrated with the knowledge of customers? (4) How can the rules help us to make a strategy during we design new digital camera? To investigate these research issues, the Apriori and C5.0 algorithms are methodologies of association rules and decision trees for data mining, which is implemented to mine customer’s needs. Knowledge extracted from data mining results is illustrated as knowledge patterns and rules on a product map in order to propose possible suggestions and solutions for product design and marketing.     

判别分析在电信客户分类中的应用

随着中国电信市场的逐渐成熟,电信行业面临着如何从以“以产品信息为中心”向“以客户为中心”转变的难题。数据挖掘能从大量数据中发现潜在和有价值的知识。从数据库中提取了相关数据,作为分析的依据,利用SPSS中的判别分析对电信数据进行挖掘,建立模型进行分析预测,对电信行业进行了客户分类和预测,使得电信商的营销决策更具有针对性,给电信商带来了更多的效益。     

To mine association rules of customer values via a data mining procedure with improved model: An empirical case study

This paper proposes a new procedure and an improved model to mine association rules of customer values. The market of online shopping industry in Taiwan is the research area. Research method adopts Ward’s method to partition online shopping market into three markets. Customer values are refined from an improved RFMDR model (based on RFM/RFMD model). Supervised Apriori algorithm is employed with customer values to create association rules. These effective rules are suggested to apply on a customized marketing function of a CRM system for enhancing their customer values to be higher grades.     

A hybrid knowledge-sharing model for corporate foreign investment in China’s construction market

The research proposes a hybrid knowledge-sharing model, which integrates the concepts of the self-organizing feature map optimization, fuzzy logic control, and hyper-rectangular composite neural networks, to provide 32 rules that suggest performing or not performing foreign construction investment. The database is derived from 520 quarterly financial reports of all listed construction companies in Taiwan that have now or in the past five years made foreign investment in China’s construction industry. The input variables are set to all 25 financial ratios assessable in public, reducing to 11 ratios after feature deduction using t-test. The model yields a high successful classification rate of 90.6% and generates 14 and 18 rules for Taiwan construction companies performing or not performing foreign investment in China, respectively. The valuable rules give user a closer look at what is the appropriate corporate financial status, what knowledge can be shared from the interpretations of the rules, and the impact by investment on corporate finance.     

Data mining methods for knowledge discovery in multi-objective optimization: Part B - New developments and applications

The first part of this paper served as a comprehensive survey of data mining methods that have been used to extract knowledge from solutions generated during multi-objective optimization. The current paper addresses three major shortcomings of existing methods, namely, lack of interactiveness in the objective space, inability to handle discrete variables and inability to generate explicit knowledge. Four data mining methods are developed that can discover knowledge in the decision space and visualize it in the objective space. These methods are (i) sequential pattern mining, (ii) clustering-based classification trees, (iii) hybrid learning, and (iv) flexible pattern mining. Each method uses a unique learning strategy to generate explicit knowledge in the form of patterns, decision rules and unsupervised rules. The methods are also capable of taking the decision maker’s preferences into account to generate knowledge unique to preferred regions of the objective space. Three realistic production systems involving different types of discrete variables are chosen as application studies. A multi-objective optimization problem is formulated for each system and solved using NSGA-II to generate the optimization datasets. Next, all four methods are applied to each dataset. In each application, the methods discover similar knowledge for specified regions of the objective space. Overall, the unsupervised rules generated by flexible pattern mining are found to be the most consistent, whereas the supervised rules from classification trees are the most sensitive to user-preferences.     

基于免疫克隆文化算法的关联规则挖掘

关联规则挖掘是数据挖掘中的一个重要任务,传统关联规则挖掘方法计算复杂度高、效率较低,而智能算法在搜索过程中具有保持种群多样性、鲁棒性等优点。本文提出基于免疫克隆文化算法的关联规则挖掘模型,该模型将免疫克隆算法嵌入到文化算法的框架中,利用免疫克隆算法的全局收敛性在数据库中迅速搜索频繁项目集,进而提取用户感兴趣的关联规则;利用文化算法信念空间的知识结构指导种群的进化,增强了搜索的目的性和方向性。实验表明,该模型具有较快的运行速度,提高了所得关联规则的准确率。     

关联规则挖掘在市场监管工作中的应用

关联规则是为了挖掘出隐藏在数据中的相互关系,找出所有能把一组事件或数据项与另一组事件或数据项联系起来的规则,从而辅助决策者进行决策。结合市场监督管理部门监管数据的实际情况,抽取市场主体部分基本信息和监管部门录入的违规、违法数据生成违规违法事务数据库,再将事务数据库转换为布尔矩阵,采用基于向量内积的关联规则挖掘方法生成频繁项集,进行关联规则挖掘。实验结果表明,该方法能够快速、准确地挖掘出相应的关联规则,符合市场监管部门日常工作的实际情况,对实际工作具有一定的指导意义。     

Characterization and analysis of sales data for the semiconductor market: An expert system approach

Chip purchasing policies of the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) of laptop computers are characterized by similarity measures and probabilistic rules. Our main goal is to build an expert system for predicting purchasing behavior in the semiconductor market. The probabilistic rules and similarity measures are extracted from data of products bought by the OEMs in the semiconductor market over twenty quarters. We present the data collected and different qualitative data mining approaches to analyze and extract rules from the data that best characterize the purchasing behavior of the OEMs. Our analysis of the similar product selection shows that there are two main groups of OEMs buying similar products. Using our probabilistic rules, we obtain an average score of approximately 95% reconstructing quarterly data for a one year window.     

A data mining approach to database compression

Data mining can dig out valuable information from databases to assist a business in approaching knowledge discovery and improving business intelligence. Database stores large structured data. The amount of data increases due to the advanced database technology and extensive use of information systems. Despite the price drop of storage devices, it is still important to develop efficient techniques for database compression. This paper develops a database compression method by eliminating redundant data, which often exist in transaction database. The proposed approach uses a data mining structure to extract association rules from a database. Redundant data will then be replaced by means of compression rules. A heuristic method is designed to resolve the conflicts of the compression rules. To prove its efficiency and effectiveness, the proposed approach is compared with two other database compression methods. Chin-Feng Lee is an associate professor with the Department of Information Management at Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1994 and 1998, respectively, from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Chung Cheng University. Her current research interests include database design, image processing and data mining techniques. S. Wesley Changchien is a professor with the Institute of Electronic Commerce at National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan, R.O.C. He received a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering (1989) and completed his MS (1993) and Ph.D. (1996) degrees in Industrial Engineering at State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. His current research interests include electronic commerce, internet/database marketing, knowledge management, data mining, and decision support systems. Jau-Ji Shen received his Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering and Computer Science from National Taiwan University at Taipei, Taiwan in 1988. From 1988 to 1994, he was the leader of the software group in Institute of Aeronautic, Chung-Sung Institute of Science and Technology. He is currently an associate professor of information management department in the National Chung Hsing University at Taichung. His research areas focus on the digital multimedia, database and information security. His current research areas focus on data engineering, database techniques and information security. Wei-Tse Wang received the B.A. (2001) and M.B.A (2003) degrees in Information Management at Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. His research interests include data mining, XML, and database compression.     

基于形式概念分析的柔性决策规划

关联规则获取是知识发现和数据挖掘中的核心问题之一.对超市来讲,从交易数据中挖掘出的关联规则有两点重要意义:一是有助于设计商品的摆放位置;二是帮助商品进货搭配规划,为更好利用关联规则进行进货搭配规划,知识工程师不仅需要考虑关联规则的可信度、支持度和兴趣度,更需要考虑支持集对关联规则的贡献度和关联规则自身的平衡度和复杂度.本文首先采用形式概念分析理论挖掘交易数据中的关联规则,这些规则具有100%的可信度.然后,在关联规则柔性筛选的基础上进行商品进货决策规划.所谓柔性是指用户可自己定义规则的不同阈值组合(例如析取和合取)选择规则.     

Mining temporal interval relational rules from temporal data

Temporal data mining is still one of important research topic since there are application areas that need knowledge from temporal data such as sequential patterns, similar time sequences, cyclic and temporal association rules, and so on. Although there are many studies for temporal data mining, they do not deal with discovering knowledge from temporal interval data such as patient histories, purchaser histories, and web logs etc. We propose a new temporal data mining technique that can extract temporal interval relation rules from temporal interval data by using Allen’s theory: a preprocessing algorithm designed for the generalization of temporal interval data and a temporal relation algorithm for mining temporal relation rules from the generalized temporal interval data. This technique can provide more useful knowledge in comparison with conventional data mining techniques.     

Warning system for online market research – Identifying critical situations in online opinion formation

More and more consumers are relying on online opinions when making purchasing decisions. For this reason, companies must have knowledge of the actual standing of their products on the Web. A warning system for online market research is being proposed which allows the identification of critical situations in online opinion formation. When critical situations are detected, warnings are subsequently sent to marketing managers and thus allowing marketers the ability to initiate preventive measures. The warning system operates on a knowledge base which contains product-related success values, online opinions and patterns of social interactions. This knowledge is acquired using methods coming from information extraction, text mining and social network analysis. Based on this knowledge the warning system judges situations accordingly. For this purpose, a neuro-fuzzy approach is chosen which learns linguistic rules from data. These rules are employed to estimate future situations. The warning system is applied to two scenarios and yields good results. An evaluation shows that all components of the warning system outperform alternative methods.     

基于关联规则的购物卡欺诈检测研究

关联规则分析被认为是数据挖掘中最有效的研究模型,能够发现相关项目之间潜在有用的关联规则,从而为决策者提供决策支持或为政策法规的制定提供依据。零售业的竞争越来越激烈,关联规则被广泛地应用到零售行业的数据分析中,基于此,以购物卡为例,为了检测和预防购物卡欺诈,从事务购物卡数据库中抽取知识,分析购物卡欺诈的一般特性,以便得出正常的行为模式,对于零售业业务风险管理的提升有所帮助。     

元规则指导的知识发现方法研究

传统的知识发现方法缺乏挖掘的针对性,效率较低,挖掘出的规则数量巨大,需要进行复杂的知识筛选工作;挖掘出的规则用低层次的原始数据表示,难以理解。无规则是对挖掘结果模式的一种表示方法,是将背景知识融入知识发现过程、提高挖掘结果的有趣性和挖掘速度的重要方法。该文研究利用概念表示数据之间的关系,提高规则的可理解性;将概念和无规则相集合,提出了基于概念的无规则指导的知识发现方法,并给出了概念的生成方法和无规则的构造方法。