A Combined Approach for Customer Profiling in Video on Demand Services Using Clustering and Association Rule Mining

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose a combined data mining approach for analyzing and profiling customers in video on demand (VoD) services. The proposed approach integrates clustering and association rule mining. For customer segmentation, the LRFMP model is employed alongside the k-means and Apriori algorithms to generate association rules between the identified customer groups and content genres. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated on real-world data obtained from an Internet protocol television (IPTV) operator. In this way, four main customer groups are identified: "high consuming-valuable subscribers", "less consuming subscribers","less consuming-loyal subscribers" and "disloyal subscribers". In detail, for each group of customers, a different marketing strategy or action is proposed, mainly campaigns, special-day promotions, discounted materials, offering favorite content, etc. Further, genres preferred by these customer segments are extracted using the Apriori algorithm. The results obtained from this case study also show that the proposed approach provides an efficient tool to form different customer segments with specific content rental characteristics, and to generate useful association rules for these distinct groups. The proposed combined approach in this research would be beneficial for IPTV service providers to implement effective CRM and customer-based marketing strategies.