Abstract: Market Basket Analysis is an important topic to cover in a Management Information Systems course. Rather than teach only the concept, our philosophy is to teach the topic using hands-on activities where students perform an analysis on a small but non-trivial data set. Our approach does not require knowledge of SQL, programming, or special software. Students use simple Microsoft Access functionality to find frequent itemsets and association rules. We believe this approach is a rigorous and engaging way to teach Market Basket Analysis that is most appropriate for an introductory course. Our follow-on Business Database course revisits the topic in a more technical manner where students write SQL queries. Thus, students are introduced to various SQL features through a fundamentally important topic that they have already seen in the prerequisite course. This paper describes the cognitive support structures used to introduce Market Basket Analysis, the details of how the activities are performed without SQL, and how we reinforce the topic with SQL in our Business Database course.

Keywords: Management Information Systems, Business Intelligence, database systems, market basket analysis, laboratory-based learning, association rules

Download this article: ISEDJ - V10 N6 Page 38.pdf

Recommended Citation: Yoder, R., Vandenberg, S., Breimer, E. (2012). Market Basket Analysis for Non-Programmers. Information Systems Education Journal, 10(6) pp 38-50. http://isedj.org/2012-10/ ISSN: 1545-679X. (A preliminary version appears in The Proceedings of ISECON 2011)