Investigating consumers’ store-choice behavior via hierarchical variable selection

Advances in Data Analysis and Classification volume 13, pages621–639(2019)Cite this article

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a store-choice model for investigating consumers’ store-choice behavior based on scanner panel data. Our store-choice model enables us to evaluate the effects of the consumer/product attributes not only on the consumer’s store choice but also on his/her purchase quantity. Moreover, we adopt a mixed-integer optimization (MIO) approach to selecting the best set of explanatory variables with which to construct the store-choice model. We devise two MIO models for hierarchical variable selection in which the hierarchical structure of product categories is used to enhance the reliability and computational efficiency of the variable selection. We assess the effectiveness of our MIO models through computational experiments on actual scanner panel data. These experiments are focused on the consumer’s choice among three types of stores in Japan: convenience stores, drugstores, and (grocery) supermarkets. The computational results demonstrate that our method has several advantages over the common methods for variable selection, namely, the stepwise method and \(L_1\)-regularized regression. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that convenience stores are most strongly chosen for gift cards and garbage disposal permits, drugstores are most strongly chosen for products that are specific to drugstores, and supermarkets are most strongly chosen for health food products by women with families.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP15K17146, JP17K12983 and a Grant-in-Aid of Joint Research from the Institute of Information Science, Senshu University.

Author information

Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki, 305-8577, Japan

    Toshiki Sato

  2. Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki, 305-8577, Japan

    Yuichi Takano

  3. School of Commerce, Senshu University, 2-1-1 Higashimita, Tama-ku, Kawasaki-shi, Kanagawa, 214-8580, Japan

    Takanobu Nakahara

Authors
  1. Toshiki Sato
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  2. Yuichi Takano
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  3. Takanobu Nakahara
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Correspondence to Yuichi Takano.

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Sato, T., Takano, Y. & Nakahara, T. Investigating consumers’ store-choice behavior via hierarchical variable selection. Adv Data Anal Classif 13, 621–639 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11634-018-0327-0

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Keywords

  • Store choice
  • Variable selection
  • Mixed-integer optimization
  • Multiple regression analysis
  • Scanner panel data

Mathematics Subject Classification

  • 62-07 Data analysis