Customer Shopping Pattern Model
We study the customer behaviour though time with equal time steps (intervals) as demonstrated in Figure 3. The time interval can be weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or etc. Since the first purchase time among customers is different, we define a lower limit and upper limit during the time. The lower limit refers to the start point of our study and the upper limit refers to the end point of our study through time. In this case, we can define some equal time intervals between the lower and upper limits, as shown in Figure 3. The shopper’s purchase is then identified in each time interval and the R, F, and M variables are computed with respect to any point of interest.