How to build a Market Basket Analysis Engine

A market basket analysis or recommendation engine [1] is what is behind all these recommendations we get when we go shopping online or whenever we receive targeted advertising. The underlying engine collects information about people's habits and knows that if people buy pasta and wine, they are usually also interested in pasta sauces. So, the next time you go to the supermarket and buy pasta and wine, be ready to get a recommendation for some pasta sauce! A typical analysis goal when applying market basket analysis it to produce a set of association rules in the following form: IF {pasta, wine, garlic} THEN pasta-sauce The first part of the rule is called "antecedent", the second part is called "consequent". A few measures, such as support, confidence, and lift, define how reliable each rule is.