Elsevier

Information Sciences

Volume 180, Issue 11, 1 June 2010, Pages 2230-2238
Information Sciences

A Dominance-based Rough Set Approach to customer behavior in the airline market

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2010.01.025Get rights and content

Abstract

Market segmentation is a crucial activity in the present business environment. Data mining is a useful tool for identifying customer behavior patterns in large amounts of data. This information can then be used to help with decision-making in areas such as the airline market. In this study, we use the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) to provide a set of rules for determining customer attitudes and loyalties, which can help managers develop strategies to acquire new customers and retain highly valued ones. A set of rules is derived from a large sample of international airline customers, and its predictive ability is evaluated. The results, as compared with those of multiple discriminate analyses, are very encouraging. They prove the usefulness of the proposed method in predicting the behavior of airline customers. This study demonstrates that the DRSA model helps to identify customers, determine their characteristics, and facilitate the development of a marketing strategy.

Introduction

In the face of a highly competitive and fast-changing airline market, managers must not only provide high-quality service but also react appropriately to changes in customer needs. However, it would be helpful if, instead of targeting all customers equally or offering the same incentives to all customers, enterprises could target only those customers who meet certain profitability criteria based on their individual needs or purchasing behaviors [5]. Customer behavior is the result of complex interactions between a number of factors, which can include the level of marketing activity, the competitiveness of the environment, brand perception, the influence of new technologies, and individual needs [34]. The characteristics and behaviors of airline customers are even more complex, and customer perception and behavior are affected by many factors, such as safety, service, technology, environment, price and many others. Hence, it is crucial that management determine the most important factors that affect the attitude and loyalty of airline customers. In the past, researchers have generally made use of statistical surveys to determine customer behavior. In such surveys, natural language or linguistic variables (e.g., “although the airline service is satisfactory, the price of the product being offered is high, the individual’s decision is not to purchase”) are used to describe customer patterns. Unfortunately, this can create an environment of imprecision, uncertainty, and partiality with regard to knowledge. These linguistic variables are then transformed into quantitative values, after which factor, cluster, and discriminant analyses are conducted. However, the semantic imprecision of natural languages leads to problems of computation, especially when the information described in a natural language is beyond the reach of existing bivalent logic and probability theory techniques [41].

Recently, data mining techniques have been adopted to predict customer behavior [6], [30]. Data mining is one stage in Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), involving the application of specific algorithms for pattern extraction [21]. Marketing managers can develop strategies to attract new customers and retain highly valued ones based on this mined knowledge. The Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA), originally developed by Greco et al. [8], [9], is a relatively new approach in data mining that is very useful for data reduction in qualitative analysis. The rough set theory, a kind of natural language computation, is particularly useful for dealing with imprecise or vague concepts [23]. Basically, natural language computation is a system in which the objects of computation are simply predicates and propositions drawn from a natural language. A set of decision rules is generated by applying the rough set approach to analyze the classification data. These decision rules are in the form of logic statements of the type “if conditions, then decision”. The set of decision rules represents a preference model for the decision-maker that is expressed in a natural and understandable language. According to Zhu et al. [40], the rough set method does not require additional information about the data; it can work with imprecise values or uncertain data, is capable of discovering important facts hidden in that data, and has the capacity to express them in natural language. The rough set theory has been successfully applied in a variety of fields, including medical diagnosis, engineering reliability, expert systems, empirical studies of material data [15], evaluation of bankruptcy risk [29], machine diagnosis [39], business failure prediction [1], [4], network intrusion detection [40], travel demand analysis [7], mining stock price [35], the insurance market [28], and accident prevention [36].

Although the Classical Rough Set Approach (CRSA) is a powerful tool for handling many problems, it is not able to deal with inconsistencies originating from the criteria, e.g., attributes with preference-ordered domains (scale) like product quality, market share, and debt ratio [10]. However, the DRSA has an advantage over the CRSA in that it has access to an information table that displays comprehensive dominance relations. It is able to deal with inconsistencies where decisive classes are not consistent with their criteria. The aim of this study is to mine data regarding airline customer behavior using the DRSA. The derived knowledge can help airlines identify valuable customers, predict future behavior, and enable firms to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions.

Section snippets

Customer behavior

In most research on customer behavior, customer demographic variables are applied to analyze customer behavior [30]. However, Rayport and Sviokla [27] suggest that a customer’s perception of product or service value is comprised of three basic elements: the product or service that a company offers, the context in which a company offers this product or service, and the infrastructure that enables the transaction to take place. In the traditional marketplace, content, context, and infrastructure

Basic concepts of the Dominance Rough Set Approach

The rough set theory, firstly introduced by Pawlak [22] in 1982, is a valuable mathematical tool for dealing with vagueness and uncertainty [23]. For a long time, the use of the rough set approach and other data mining techniques was restricted to classification problems where the preference order of the evaluations was not considered. This is due to the fact that this method cannot handle inconsistencies that occur as a result of the violation of the dominance principle [10]. In order to deal

Empirical study: a case of customer behaviors in the airline market

In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the DRSA and our proposed approach, we carried out an empirical study that is described in this section. We produced a questionnaire about customer behavior in the airline market with single and multiple-choice answers and used DRSA to explore the classification problem. The results should provide airlines with useful information to help them develop marketing strategies and achieve their marketing goals.

Discussion

Using the same data set and dummy-variable technique, we also apply discriminant analysis. The results are shown in Table 5. Clearly the DRSA shows better prediction ability than does discriminant analysis. The hit rate increases from 91.8% for discriminant analysis to 95.6% for DRSA. Furthermore, in contrast to discriminant analysis, the rough set theory requires no underlying statistical assumptions. In particular, the DSRA can handle both attributes/criteria with and without preference

Conclusions

This study illustrates the usefulness of the DRSA approach as an operational tool for the prediction of customer behavior in the air transport market. The proposed prediction model takes the form of decision rules. Since the derived rules are supported by real examples, they describe only the most relevant attributes/criteria. The classical rough set theory handles attributes without preferences, a technique that does not always accurately represent the real world. The DRSA is constructed by

Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by National Science Committee of Taiwan under Grant No. NSC 98-2410-H-424-005.

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