IPA FE Subject A 2025 Question 16
A question IPA Japan published in 令和７年度 基本情報技術者試験 科目A 公開問題 問16, translated into English. ITPEC is based on the same exams.
Which of the following is an analysis technique that is one of the techniques of data mining and discovers combinations of “products that are bought together” from accumulated data such as POS data?
Explanation
Market basket analysis — the data mining technique that finds which products are bought together in one purchase.
It treats each receipt in the accumulated POS data as a basket and looks for products that appear in the same basket more often than chance would explain. The results are association rules such as “customers who buy bread also buy milk”, rated by support (the share of all baskets that hold both) and confidence (the share of bread baskets that also hold milk). Retailers use them for shelf layout, set offers and recommendations.
Answer (d)
Why not others:
- •(a) 3C analysis — examines a company's business environment from three viewpoints, Customer, Competitor and Company; it is not a technique for mining transaction data
- •(b) ABC analysis — ranks items by their share of sales into groups A, B and C to decide where to focus management; it looks at items one by one, not at combinations
- •(c) Conjoint analysis — estimates how much each attribute of a product (price, size, colour) contributes to customers' preference, from survey ratings; it combines attributes of one product, not products in one purchase
Key rule: Bought together: market basket (association) analysis; ranked by share of sales: ABC analysis; which attributes customers value: conjoint analysis; customer, competitor, company: 3C analysis.
System Strategy · AI-written, may contain errors
This question comes from the past questions IPA Japan publishes, translated into English by ITPEC Practice. ITPEC Practice is an independent study tool and is not affiliated with IPA or ITPEC. See the original paper (PDF) or Report an issue.