Preposition 1: Private (store) brands can be an instrument for retailers to generate store differentiation, store loyalty, and store profitability, even when the private brand does not have a margin advantage over the national brand (Corstgens and Lal, 2000).

Preposition 2: Demographic traits potentially drive the set of association rules among private (store) brands (Ailawadi et al., 2001).

Association rules: Sometimes it is hard to find a very useful rule, in spite of the fact that the confidence and lift are high. For example, [lhs: potted plants] → [rhs: whole milk]; confidence=.40 and lift=1.56. Does this rule seem like a very useful rule? Probably not, as there doesn’t seem to be a logical reason why someone would be more likely to buy milk with a potted plant. Yet, our data suggests otherwise. How can we make sense of this fact?

A common approach is to take the association rules and divide them into the following three categories:
Actionable
Trivial
Inexplicable

Obviously, the goal of a market basket analysis is to find actionable rules that provide a clear and useful insight. Some rules are clear, others are useful; it is less common to find a combination of both of these factors.
So-called trivial rules include any rules that are so obvious that they are not worth mentioning – they are clear, but not useful. Suppose you were a marketing consultant being paid large sums of money to identify new opportunities for cross-promoting items. If you report the finding that [diapers] → [formula], you probably won’t be invited back for another consulting job. Trivial rules can also sneak in disguised as more interesting results. For instance, say you found an association between a particular brand of children’s cereal and a certain DVD movie. This finding is not very insightful if the movie’s main character is on the front of the cereal box.

Rules are inexplicable if the connection between the items is so unclear that figuring out how to use the information is impossible or nearly impossible. The rule may simply be a random pattern in the data, for instance, a rule stating [pickles] → [chocolate ice cream] may be due to a single customer, whose pregnant wife had regular cravings for strange combination of foods.

Use income, home composition, and age data] Based on the preposition 1 and 2, find out the 5 actionable, 3 trivial, and 1 inexplicable rules.

Preposition 1: Private (store) brands can be an instrument for reta...