Market basket analysis in insurance industry

Abstract

Nowadays, many organizations focus on discovering their customers’ hidden patterns to maintain their competitive position through customer analysis. In fact, more and more organizations are realizing that customers are their most valuable resources. This paper performs a research using data associated with 300 clients of an insurance company in city of Anzali, Iran and they are analyzed using K-Means clustering method. Using demographic variables including gender, age, occupation, education level, marital status, place of residence and clients’ incomes, the study determines the optimal numbers of clusters in order to achieve necessary data for grouping customers. Next, the study uses the method of association rules to find hidden patterns for the insurance industry.

Full text

*Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: kvahidi1989@yahoo.com (M. Vahidi Roodpis hi)
© 2015 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi: 10.5267/j.msl.2015.2.004
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Management Science Letters 5 (2015) 393–400
Contents lists available at GrowingScience
Management Science Letters
homepage: www.GrowingScience.com/msl
Market basket analysis in insurance industry
Marzieh Vahidi Roodpishia* and Reza Aghajan Nashtaeib
aM.A. of Business Management, Rasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Rasht, Iran
bDepartment of Business Management, Rasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Rasht, Iran
C H R O N I C L E A B S T R A C T
Article history:
Received October 28, 2014
Received in revised format 2
February 2015
Accepted 4 February 2015
Available online
February 4 2015
Nowadays, many organizations focus on discovering their customers’ hidden patterns to
maintain their competitive position through customer analysis. In fact, more and more
organizations are realizing that customers are their most valuable resources. This paper
performs a research using data associated with 300 clients of an insurance company in city of
Anzali, Iran and they are analyzed using K-Means clustering method. Using demographic
variables including gender, age, occupation, education level, marital status, place of residence
and clients’ incomes, the study determines the optimal numbers of clusters in order to achieve
necessary data for grouping customers. Next, the study uses the method of association rules to
find hidden patterns for the insurance industry.
Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 5© 201
Keywords:
Insurance industry
Shopping basket analysis
Data mining
Clustering
Association rules
1. Introduction
With the advent of new technology and competition facilities, the market environment of the insurance
industry has become highly competitive. Insurance industry and the entry of private insurance have led
to intense competition among new firms and older firms pay more attention to ways of analyzing
customer data. Therefore, considering the market basket helps insurance firms reach better
understanding about clients’ demands. Decision-making and understanding customer behavior are
critical and challenging issues for organizations to maintain their position in the competitive market.
Technological innovation also helps firms achieve better processing of customers’ needs. Data mining
tools as the most reliable tool for analyzing large amounts of data helps achieve success in decision-
making.Data mining analysis can be effectively used to determine the patterns and to optimize the
dynamic behavior of transactions made by consumers for the purchase of specific products. Mansur
and Kuncoro (2012), in a survey, tried to find out more about consumers’ behavior in buying the
products so it could be used to forecast the purchasing for the next period. Later, they used the
prediction as a decision support in detecting the suitable amount of inventory for each product at

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Karomah Brass, which was a small and medium enterprise. The techniques used in this study were
based on the Market Basket Analysis (MBA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) Back propagation.
They used MBA to investigate the buying behavior of customer while ANN Back propagation was
applied to predict product inventory's requirements/needs for each product. They reported that the
customers frequently buy products that serve as a type of antique closet accessories and if customer
purchased that certain product, then they would also buy similar products in accordance with 21 rules
obtained from the mining of transaction data.
Trnka (2010) explained the way of MBA implementation to Six Sigma methodology. Data mining
techniques provide significant amount of opportunities in the market sector. Data mining applications
are becoming increasingly popular for many applications across a set of very divergent fields. Six
Sigma methodology implements several statistical techniques (Pande & Abdel-Aty, 2009). With
implementation of MBA as a part of Data Mining (Han et al., 2006) to Six Sigma Trnka improved the
results and changed the Sigma performance level of the process. In his survey, General Rule Induction
algorithm to produce association rules between products in the market basket was implemented. Cheng
and Chen (2009) presented a new procedure, joining quantitative value of RFM attributes and K-means
algorithm into rough set theory (RS theory), to obtain meaning rules and to find out the characteristic
of customer in order to strengthen CRM.
According to Russell and Petersen (2000), Market basket choice is a decision process in which a
consumer chooses different items from a number of product categories on the same shopping trip. The
primary feature of market basket choice is the interdependence in demand relationships across the
things in the target basket. Russell and Petersen (2000) developed a new method to the specification of
market basket models, which helps a choice model for a basket of products to be built using a set of
“local” conditional choice models corresponding to each item in the basket. The method provides a
parsimonious market basket model, which permits for any kind of demand relationship across product
categories and can be forecasted based on simple modifications of standard multinomial logit software.
Tang et al. (2008) presented a method to perform MBA in a multiple-store and multiple-period
environment. They first defined a time concept hierarchy and a place (location) hierarchy, based on the
application and requirements. A set of contexts was systematically extracted from the two hierarchies
by integrating the concept levels of the two hierarchies. They developed an efficient approach for
extracting the association rules, which could meet the support and confidence needs for all the contexts.
Using the approach, a decision maker is able to analyze purchasing patterns at very detailed concept
levels of time and place and combinations of detailed levels of one with general level of the other. The
association rules appeared to be well organized, because they were generated based on the contexts
extracted from the time and place hierarchies.
Cavique (2007) presented a method to discover large itemset patterns for the MBA, where the
condensed data were used and was obtained by transforming the market basket problem into a
maximum-weighted clique problem. Wick and Wagner (2006) applied MBA to integrate and motivate
topics in discrete structures. Dhanabhakyam and Punithavalli (2011) examined customer buying
patterns by detecting associations among different items that customers place in their shopping baskets.
Raorane et al. (2012) investigated the huge amount of data thereby exploiting the consumer behavior
and making the correct decision leading to competitive edge over rivals. Yun et al. (2006) explored a
clustering of market-basket data, which was different from the traditional data.
2. The proposed model
This paper performs a research using data of 300 clients of insurance company in city of Anzali, Iran
and they are analyzed using K-Means clustering method. Using demographic variables including
gender, age, occupation, education level, marital status, place of residence, income clients the study
determines the optimal number of clusters in order to achieve necessary data for grouping customers.

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Next, the study uses the method of association rules and practice of insurance policies to find hidden
patterns in the insurance industry. Fig. 1 demonstrates the summary of the proposed study.
Fig. 1. The structure of the proposed study
In Fig. 1, the structure proposed study includes the following:
 The first step is to review the literature and identify relevant variables for modeling the behavior of
the customers and design the questionnaire to collect the data from the insurance companies.
 The second step of the K-Means is associated with clustering and using demographic variables
including gender, age, occupation, education level, marital status, place of residence, income clients to
determine the optimal number of clusters, on the banks intelligence.
 The third step uses the method of association rules to determine hidden patterns in cart insurance
industry clients.
 The fourth step is to validate the results obtained by our data on the association rules.
The study has accomplished among customers of third party car insurance in city of Anzali located in
province of Gilan, Iran in 2014. All questionnaires were distributed in 6 Insurance Agents in Iran. This
paper performs a research using data of 300 clients of insurance company in city of Anzali, Iran and
they are analyzed using K-Means clustering method.
2.1 K-means technique
The K-means technique has become popular method in generating appropriate clustering results for
many real-world case studies. K-means clustering is a well-known data mining clustering model, which
tries to partition N observations into K clusters where each observation is assigned to the cluster with
the closest mean. Normal evaluation of an appropriate K is performed by minimizing the inner-cluster
variation and maximizing the among-cluster variation, concurrently. K-means clustering is normally
sensitive to outliers, therefore, outliers have to be eliminated before accomplishing clustering. Edwards
(2003) and Kantardzic (2011) described the K-means method with the following steps,
1. Select a primary part of K categories including samples randomly chosen and compute the mean of
each pair,
2. Build a new section of each part by computing the nearest center core,
3. Compute the new batches as the main centers,
4. Repeat step 2 and step 3 until the algorithm reaches termination criteria.

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2.2. Association rules
Non-regulatory mining association rules in data mining to establish the relationship between the items
are created. An association rule of the form X → Y is a term meaning that X and Y are discrete sets of
items. (X ∩ Y = Y) means that Power of Community law can be given support and confidence measures
(Ngai et al., 2009).
3. Implementation
For the proposed study of this paper, the implementation of the data modeling, data mining software
are executed using SPSS Clementine data mining software, which is widely used for modeling. We
consider the following three steps:
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Step One: Use the clustering method to get the direction of grouping customers,
Step Two: Use the method of association rules to find hidden patterns in the insurance industry
customer MBA,
Step Three: Review the insurance industry clients Basket validation by association rules.
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3.1. Clustering
Clustering the data is accomplished based on the demographic variables including gender, age,
occupation, education level, marital status, place of residence and clients’ income clients. These are
more descriptive data and the proposed study uses a K-Means clustering. For the implementation of K-
Means clustering, the number of clusters is important. Therefore, we optimized it using SSE criterion
for assessing the quality of clustering to determine the number of clusters. Due to the high volume of
data to compare, the number of clusters starts from 2 clusters and Table 1 demonstrates the results of
SSE for different numbers of clusters.
Table 1
The number of parameters career clusters
Number of clusters 2 3 4 5 6
SSE 1.548341 1.547119 1.600229 1.593326 1.629742
Characteristics of each cluster are as follows :
Cluster 1: Customers or employees, mostly engineers, earn a monthly income of between 5×106-10×106
Rials.
Cluster 2: Customers, employees or farms with income between 2.5×106-5×106 Rials and are mostly
high school graduates.
Cluster 3: Customers aged 35-50 with 12-14 years of education and a monthly income of 5×106-20×106
Rials.
Cluster 4: Customers aged 35-50 with Bachelor degree of science and a monthly income of 10×106-
20×106 Rials.
Cluster 5: Customers aged, at least, 50 with 12 years of education and a monthly income of at least
20×106 Rials.
3.2. Association rules and hidden patterns
Once the data for insurance customers have been collected and clustering has been accomplished, we
examined the association rules hidden in each cluster using causal extraction algorithm. The following
items have been investigated for validation of the data,

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397
• Which insurance services do customers use (auto insurance, life insurance, health insurance,
accident insurance, liability insurance, engineering insurance),
• Term life insurance,
• Annual fee for insurance,
• Specifications of the month of insurance,
• Location of the insurance firm,
• Validity of the leading insurance company in the insurance services,
• Use the services of the insurance company upon the recommendation of friends and family,
• The advantage of insurance company's offer to friends and family.
Tables 2-6 present some examples of applying Association rule derived based on on clusters of 1 to 5.
Table 2
Examples of association rules in cluster
Consequence Antecedent Support% Confidence% Lift
Car Insurance = Yes
Time = 2-5 and Month = 2nd quarter and Credit = yes and Life= yes
and Income = 5×106-10×106 Rials
26.596 80.0 1.106
Life Insurance= Yes
Time = 2-5 and Month = 2nd quarter and Credit = yes and Life= yes
and Income = 5×106-10×106 Rials and Engineering = Yes
15.957 80.0 1.016
Car Insurance = Yes
= Accidentquarter and Credit = yes and
nd
5 and Month = 2-Time = 2
Engineering = Yesand Rials
6
10×10-
6
5×10yes and Income =
27.66 80.769 1.117
Car Insurance = Yes
quarter and Credit = yes and Life= yes
nd
5 and Month = 2-Time = 2
Engineering = Yesand Rials
6
10×10-
6
5×10Income = and
31.914 83.333 1.152
Accident= yes
quarter and Credit = yes and Life= yes
nd
5 and Month = 2-Time = 2
Engineering = Yesand Rials
6
10×10-
6
5×10Income = and
28.723 85.185 1.144
Accident= yes
quarter and Credit = yes and Life= yes
nd
and Month = 2 2-1Time =
Engineering = Yesand Rials
6
10×10-
6
5×10Income = and
24.468 86.667 1.163
Engineering = Yes
Credit = yes and Accidentquarter and
nd
5 and Month = 2-Time = 2
Rials
6
10×10-
6
5×10Income = = Yes and
24.468 100.0 1.0217
Engineering = Yes
Income Credit = Yes and and Car ownership = yes5 and -Time = 2
Rials
6
10×10-
6
5×10=
26.596 100.0 1.0217
Accident= yes
Income = Credit = Yes and quarter and
nd
5 and Month = 2-Time = 2
Engineering = Yesand Rials
6
10×10-
6
5×10
28.723 85.185 1.144
The results of Table 2 indicate that the cluster is ruled by one of the following:
1) People who use their car insurance usually have maintained between 1 to 5 years of insurance
services. Usually, this is the second quarter to extend the validity of the insurance care, Life insurance
and engineering services and income between 5×106-10×106.
2) People who use life insurance usually hold between 1 to 2 years insurance. Usually, this is the second
quarter to extend insurance and engineering insurance services are between 500 thousand to 1 million
dollars.
3) People who usually have between 1 to 5 years of car insurance. This is usually the second quarter to
extend insurance and engineering insurance and life insurance services.
4) People who use their car insurance and it has been between 1 to 2 years of using their insurance.
This is the second quarter to extend their insurance and engineering insurance and have incomes
between 5×106-10×106 Rials.
5) People who use their engineering insurance and they have maintained between 2 to 5 years of using
their insurance. Usually this is the second quarter of credit insurance services, life insurance is
important for them to use and their incomes are between 5×106-10×106 Rials.

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Table 3
Examples of association rules in the second cluster
Consequence Antecedent Support% Confidence% Lift
Car Insurance = Yes
<= yes and Income Place quarter and
dr
35 and Month = -Time = 2
Rials
6
5×102
18.181 87.5 0.962
Car Insurance = Yes
<= yes and Income Place quarter and
dr
3and Month = 10-5Time =
Rials
6
5×102
13.636 100.0 1.1
Based on the results of Table 3, the following can be concluded,
1) People who use their car insurance and maintain between 5 and 10 years of insurance. Place of
issuing insurance is important.
2) People who use their car insurance and maintain between 5 and 10 years of insurance. Place of
issuing insurance is important.
Table 4
Examples of association rules in cluster 3
Consequence Antecedent
Support% Confidence% Lift
Life insurance
= yes
-
6
5×10Income =quarter and Place = yes
rd
and Month = 35 -Time = 2
Rials and Car Insurance = yes
6
10×10
19.608 80.0 0.983
Life insurance
= yes
Place = yes and Responsibility insurance = yes and Accident insurance =
yes and Car Insurance = yes
79.412 80.246 0.986
Life insurance
= yes
-
6
5×10Income = quarter and Place = yes
rd
and Month = 3 2-1Time =
Insurance = yes ResponsibilityRials and
6
10×10
16.667 82.352 1.012
Accident
insurance = yes
Time < 1 and Life insurance = yes and Month = 3rd quarter and Credit =
yes and Place = yes
11.764 83.33 0.913
Accident
insurance = yes
and Credit = yes quarter
rd
Month = 3< 1 and Car insurance = yes and Time
and Place = yes
14.706 80.0 0.877
Car Insurance =
yes
6
10×10-
6
5×10Income == yes Creditquarter and
rd
and Month = 3< 1Time
Rials
12.745 100.0 1.009
According to Table 3, the following can be concluded,
1) People use their life insurance usually between 2 and 5 years. They renew their insurance in the third
quarter of the year and place of insurance firm is important for them.
2) People who use their life insurance usually between 1 to 2 years of insurance plan and renew their
life insurance in the third quarter of year and provide liability and accident insurance.
3) People who use life insurance where the insurance company is important in choosing their insurer.
And liability insurance and auto accidents are often used.
4) People who have insurance are usually under one year of using insurance. They renew their insurance
in the third quarter of year.
Table 5
Examples of association rules in cluster 4
Consequence Antecedent Support% Confidence% Lift
Accidence
Insurance = yes
Rials and
6
20×10-
6
10×105 and Credit = yes Income =-Time = 2
Engineering Insurance = yes and Life Insurance = yes
27.027 80.0 0.925
Life insurance =
yes
quarter and Accident = yes and Income
n
d
5 and Month = 2-Time = 2
Rials and Credit = yes
6
20×10-
6
10×10=
29.73 90.909 0.961
Life insurance =
yes
quarter and Accident = yes and Income
n
d
5 and Month = 2-Time = 2
Rials and Engineering insurance = yes
6
20×10-
6
10×10=
29.73 90.909 0.961
Engineering
Insurance = yes
quarter and Accident = yes and Income
n
d
5 and Month = 2-Time = 2
Rials and Engineering insurance = yes
6
20×10-
6
10×10=
62.162 100.0 1.0571
Engineering
Insurance = yes
quarter and Life insurance = yes and Income
nd
5 and Month = 2-Time = 2
Rials and Credit = yes
6
20×10-
6
10×10=
27.027 100.0 1.0571
Accidence
Insurance = yes
Rials
6
20×10-
6
10×105 and Life insurance = yes and Income =-Time = 2
and Credit = yes and Engineering insurance = yes
37.837 92.857 1.073
Accidence
Insurance = yes
-
6
10×10quarter and Life insurance = yes and Income =
nd
Month = 2
Rials and Credit = yes
6
20×10
64.864 95.833 1.108

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399
According to Table 5, the following can be concluded,
1) People who use their life insurance have between 2 and 5 years of insurance and extend their
insurance and engineering insurance services during the second quarter of the season. Credit insurance
is also important for them.
2) People who use insurance have 1 to 2 years of insurance, extend their insurances including life
insurance services and engineering in the second quarter of year.
4. Discussion and conclusion
The present study was designed to analyze the insurance company's customers based on Market basket
analysis. The paper has performed a research using data associated with 300 clients of insurance
company in city of Anzali, Iran and they have been analyzed using K-Means clustering method. Using
demographic variables including gender, age, occupation, education level, marital status, place of
residence, clients’ income, the study has determined the optimal numbers of clusters in order to achieve
necessary data for grouping customers. Next, the study used the method of association rules and
practice of insurance policies to find hidden patterns in the insurance industry. The results of this survey
could be used for targeting appropriate customers in cities located in north regions of Iran. The study
can be also extended for other regions of the country and we leave it for interested researchers as future
studies.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their constructive comments on earlier
version of this paper.
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