Big Data

Local PurTree
Spectral Clustering
for Massive Customer
Transaction Data
Xiaojun Chen, Si Peng, Joshua Zhexue Huang,
Feiping Nie, and Yong Ming, Shenzhen University

T
A new method uses he clustering of customer transaction data is one of the most critical

a purchase tree to tasks in successful modern marketing and customer relationship man-

represent customer agement. Its used to categorize customers into different groups based on their

transaction data purchase behaviors, indicating that customers in the same cluster bought more

and computes the goods similar to each other than to those in
other clusters. Early segmentation methods
distance between used general variables such as customer de-
mographics, life style, attitude, and psychol-
two trees, learning ogy because such variables are intuitive and
easy to operate.1 But with the rapid increase
a data similarity in the amount of customer behavior data,
new studies use product-specific variables
matrix from the such as items purchased.2 These methods
often define distance in transaction records,
local distances and but such distance functions cant effectively
handle transaction data because the number
the level weights of transaction records is often very large.
Most distances defined in transaction data
simultaneously. are categorical distances, so hierarchical
clustering and genetic algorithms are com-
monly used for clustering.2,3 However, such
methods cant handle large-scale transaction
data due to their high computational complex-
ity. Advanced clustering algorithms have been
proposed in the past, such as spectral cluster-
ing,4 subspace clustering,5 multiview cluster-
ing, 6 and clustering ensemble,7,8 but few
methods have been used for transaction data.
Recently, a PurTreeClust clustering algo-
rithm was proposed for large-scale transac-
tion data.9 In this algorithm, a purchase tree
is built for each customer from the large-scale
transaction data, and a PurTree distance met-
ric is defined to measure the difference be-
tween two purchase trees. The PurTreeClust
algorithm builds a cover tree for indexing
the purchase tree dataset, selecting initial
cluster centers through a fast leveled density

march/april 2017 1541-1672/17/$33.00 2017 IEEE 37

Published by the IEEE Computer Society
Big Data
estimation method. Finally, the clus-
tering result is produced by assigning
each customer to its nearest cluster
center. However, as encouraging as this
new method is, its difficult to adjust
level weights in the PurTree distance,
and theres no optimization method for
the clustering result.
In this article, we propose LPS, a lo-
cal PurTree spectral clustering algo-
rithm, to solve these two shortcomings.
We use a weighted PurTree distance to
measure the difference between two
purchase trees. This new method au-
tomatically learns the data similarity
matrix from the local distances and
the level weights simultaneously dur-
ing the clustering process; an itera-
tive optimization algorithm optimizes
our proposed model. We used six real-
life transaction datasets, representing
nearly 500 million transaction records
and 6,000 users, to compare the clus-
tering results of LPS with those of four
commonly used clustering methods
for transaction data. The experimen-
tal results show that LPS outperformed
other algorithms.
Notations and Preliminaries
Before we get into the method and ex-
periments, we first need to set the nota-
tions that well use throughout the ar-
ticle. Let T be a tree with nodes N(T)
and edges E(T) N(T) N(T). A node
without children is a leaf; otherwise, its
an internal node. For an edge {v, w}
E(T), node w is the child of v, that is, w
Cv(T). The level of a node is defined
by 1 + (the number of edges between
the node and the root). Nl(T ) represents
nodes in the lth level of T. The height of
tree T, denoted by H(T), is the number
of edges on the longest downward path
between the root and a leaf node.
Let Y be a tree used to systemati-
cally organize items with multiple lev-
els of categories, with each leaf node
representing an item and each inter-
nal node representing a category. In
38 www.computer.org/intelligent IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS
most transaction datasets, items are The PurTree distance d(j i, j j, w)
organized with the same number of has the following properties:9
categories. Here, we assume that all
products are organized with the same d(j i, j j, w) [0, 1];
levels of categories, which means that if 1 l t H(F), then dl(j i, j j,
all leaf nodes in Y have equal depth. w) dt(j i, j j, w); and
A purchase tree j is a subgraph of d(j i, j j, w) is a metric.
Y, that is, N(j) N(Y), E(j) E(Y).
Given a node v N (j), there must Local PurTree Spectral
exist a leaf node w N(j) such that Clustering
the path from root(j) to w also exists Given a product tree Y and n pur-
in Y. For each purchase tree j, H(j) = chase trees j, we want to cluster j
H(Y). A purchase tree is used to illus- into c clusters. Let dijl be the leveled
trate the items bought by a customer. tree distance between j i and j j on the
lth level, which is computed as Equa-
Definition 1. Given a product tree Y tion 1. Assume that j i and j j are con-
and a set of n purchase trees j where nected with probability pij. A smaller
j i Y, the leveled PurTree distance distance d(j i, j j, w) will be assigned
between two purchase trees j i and with a larger probability pij. We tend
j j on the lth level is defined as to simultaneously learn w and the con-
nection probability matrix P = [pij]nn,
d l ( i , j ) = av v ( i , j ),  such that the graph constructed from
v N l ( i ) N l ( j ) P only consists of c connected compo-
(1) nents. To achieve this goal, we form
the following clustering problem:
where d v(j i, j j) is the Jaccard dis-
n H ( )
tance of j i and j j on an internal
node v, which is defined as
min
P , F ,
l dil, j pij
i , j =1 l =1
n H ( )
v ( i , j ) = 1
Cv ( i ) Cv ( j )
, (2)
+ pij2 + l2 (5)
i , j =1 l =1
Cv ( i ) Cv ( j )
subject to
and a v is the node weight for node
v N(F), which is defined as i , pT
i 1 = 1, pij [0,1]
T
1 if v = root () 1 = 1, wl [0,1] , (6)
rank(L ) = n c 
v w .
C ( ) C ( )
where v Cw ( i ) Cw ( j ) P
w i w j
(3)
where dil, j is the abbreviation of dl(j i,
Definition 2. Given H(F) level (
j j), LP = DP PT + P 2 is the Lapla-)
weights w RH(Y)1, the PurTree dis- cian matrix, the degree matrix DP
tance between two purchase trees ji, Rnn is defined as a diagonal matrix
jj F is computed as the weighted (
where dij = nj =1 pij + p ji 2 , and )
sum of the leveled tree distances de- and h are two regularization parameters.
fined in Equation 1: The first term in Equation 5 is the
pairwise product of the PurTree dis-
H ( ) tance and connection probability, in
d ( i , j , ) = l d l ( i , j ). (4) which a smaller distance d(ji, jj, w) will
l =1 be assigned with a larger probability pij.
The second and third terms are regular- researchers proved that rank(LP) = n c It can be verified that
ization terms of P and w, where and is equivalent to the following problem:4
n
h are two regularization parameters.
pij
2
2Tr(FT LP F) = fi f j ,
Because LP is a nonnegative matrix, it min T
2Tr(F LP F), (9) i , j =1
2

has been proved that the multiplicity c F R nc T

,F F = I
of the eigenvalue 0 of LP is equal to the where f i R c1 is the i-th row of F.
number of connected components in the where is a large enough parameter. Then Equation 13 can be rewritten
graph with the similarity matrix P. The Equation 7 is then equivalent to the as
rank constraint rank(LP) = n c is im- following problem:
n n
posed to LP, such that the sparse graph
constructed from P only consists of c
n H ( ) n H ( ) min [Eij pij + pij2 ]
connected components. The final clus-
min
P , F ,
l dil, j pij + pij2 + l2 P
i =1 j =1
i , j =1 l =1 i , j =1 l =1
tering assignment can be made by mak- st. i , pT
i 1 = 1, pij [0,1],
+ 2Tr(FT LP F)
(10)
ing the objects in the same connected j i , pij = 0, (14)
component belong to the same cluster. subject to
Because a transaction dataset of- where Eij is defined as
ten consists of a large number of us- i , pT
i 1 = 1, pij [0,1]
H ( )
ers, its very useful to explore the lo-
l dijl + fi f j 2 . (15)
2
j i , pij = 0 Eij =
cal connectivity during the clustering T . (11)
i =1
process. Lets assume that P is a sparse 1 = 1, wl [0,1]
T
graph in which for each i, pi contains F F = I , F Rn c Note that Equation 14 is indepen-
at most k positive values for its k-near- dent between different is, so we can
est neighbors. Since w is unknown, its We can apply the alternative opti- solve the following problem individu-
impossible to select the real k-nearest mization approach to solve Equation ally for each pi. The Lagrangian func-
neighbors. To simplify the analysis, 10. Lets examine how to derive the tion of Equation 14 for pi is
we assume that w is with equal level optimal solution to each variable in
weights and select the k-nearest neigh- Equation 10. n n
bors b i for each j i. Then we improve L(pi , X , ) = pij2 + Eij pij
Equation 5 to form the following local Optimization of F j=i j=i

PurTree clustering problem: When P and w are fixed, Equation 10 n

n H ( )
becomes +X

pij 1 pT

i , (16)
j=i
min
P , F ,
l dil, j pij min
F Rn c ,FT F = I
T
Tr(F LP F). (12)
i , j =1 l =1
H ( )
where X and positive vector t R+n1
n
+ pij2 + l2 (7) The optimal solution F to Equation
12 is formed by the c smallest eigen-
are Lagrangian multipliers.
According to the KarushKuhnTucker
i , j =1 l =1
values of L P. (KKT) condition, we have
subject to
Optimization of P
L(pi , X ,
i , pT
i 1 = 1, pij [0,1] When F and w are fixed, Equation 10 p = 2 pij + Eij + X j = 0
ij
j i , pij = 0 becomes
L(pi , X ,

T 1 = 1, wl [0,1]
. (8)
n H ( ) X
= n
j =1pij 1 = 0

rank(LP ) = n c
min
P
l dil, j pij
j , j = 0
i , j =1 l =1
n j i , pij = 0.
Its difficult to solve Equation 7 be-
cause LP = DP PT + P 2 and DP ( ) + pij2 + 2Tr(FT LP F) (17)
i , j =1
both depend on P, and the rank con-
straint rank(LP) = n c is a complex st. i , pT
i 1 = 1, pij [0,1], It can be verified that the optimal
nonlinear constraint. Fortunately, other j i , pij = 0. (13) pij of Equation 16 is

march/april 2017 www.computer.org/intelligent 39

Big Data

k H ( )
n 1
1
pij =

(Eij + X ) , (18) l =
1

2
pij dijl + X , (23) i
2 l dil, ik
dil, ij . (27)

2 + i , j =1 j =1 l =1
+
where Eij is defined in Equation 15. In Equation 7, we wish all k neigh-
To make pi consist of at most k pos- where X can be solved from the con- bors be used for clustering, so can be
itive values, we have to carefully set l straint lH=1() l = 1. set as its upper bound. However, its
such that pi computed from Equation 18 Theorem 1 states the properties of w. impossible to compute the exact upper
only consists of k positive values. The bound i because wi will change dur-
k-nn probabilities pi can be obtained Theorem 1. If 1 l t H(F), then ing the clustering process. We turn to
by solving c in the following equation wi w t, which is computed according compute an approximate upper bound
from the constraint nj =1 pij = 1 : to Equation 23. of with equal level weights of w, and
Proof set i as the approximate upper bound:
1 The PurTree distance is proved to
(Eij + X ) if j i
pij 2 + . (19) be decreasing from the top level to H ( ) k
1
0
if j i the bottom level.9 Therefore, if 1 i =
2H () d l
j =1
i , i , k +1
d l
i ,
.
ij

l t H(F), then dijl dijt . It can be l =1
Optimization of W verified that ni , j =1 pij dijl ni , j =1 pij dijt . (28)
When P and F are fixed, Equation 10 According to Equation 23, we have
becomes wl wt. The final can be set as the median
of {1 , , n}. Because k is an integer
n H ( )
Determine k and has explicit meaning, its easy to
T
min
1=1, [0,1]
l dijl pij In the new method, a regularization tune by selecting the proper k.
l i , j =1 l =1
parameter is used to adjust the dis-
H ( )
tribution of P. In practice, its difficult Determine g
+ l2 . (20)
to tune because its value could be from Next, we need to determine the value of
l =1
zero to infinite. In this subsection, we h. To utilize information in the data, we
H ( )
The Lagrangian function of Equa- present an effective method to deter- want { l }l =1 to be positive. According
tion 20 is mine the value of l. We can verify that to Equation 23, c can be solved from
the optimal pij of Equation 7 is the constraint lH=1() l = 1 as
n H ( ) H ( )
L(w , X , ) = l dijl pij + l2 pij =
2 lH=1() ni, j =1pij dijl . (29)
X= +
nh=1 lH=1() l dihl k lH=1() l dijl .
i , j =1 l =1 l =1
, i H () H ()
H ( ) +
+X
l 1 T

k 2k
Substituting into Equation 23, we
l =1 (24)
(21) have
We wish pi contains at most k posi- l =
where X and positive vector t R+H(Y)1 tive values, which means
are Lagrangian multipliers.
1
+
lH'=(1) ni, j =1pij dijl' H () ni, j =1pij dijl .
H () 2H ()
According to the KKT condition,
1 + kj =1 lH=1() l dil, ij
lH=1() l dil,
k
ik
0 (30)
we have k 2ki
, H ( )
1 k
j =1
H ( ) l
l =1 l d i , ij lH=1() l dil,
k
i , k +1
To force { }l =1 to be positive, we
L( , X , ) + 0
l
= ni, j =1dijl pij + 2 l + X j = 0 k 2ki have
(25)
L( , X , ) H ( ) n
lH=1() l 1 = 0
n
= 1

X
.
where ai bi consists of k + 1 nearest
max H ()
2 l pij dijl pij dijl' .

j , j = 0 i , j =1 l '=1 i , j =1


purchase trees for j i.
(31)
(22) Then we have
k H ( )
Because p is unknown, its impossi-
1
It can be verified that the optimal w l
of Equation 21 is
i
2 l dil, i ,k +1 dil, ij (26)

ble to compute the exact lower bound
of h. We turn to compute the upper
j =1 l =1

40 www.computer.org/intelligent IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

 Ensure: Clustering result
l
= 1 where d ij is the l-th level purchase tree distance for i and j.
Compute D = {Dl}lH( )
1.
2. For each purchase tree i, form its k-nearest neighbors i, where is given equal
values.
3. Compute i for each purchase tree i according to Equation 28. Select as the median
of {1,, n}.
4. Compute according to Equation 32.
5. Repeat
6. Update F by selecting the first c smallest values from the eigenvector of LP.
7. Update according to Equation 23.
8. Update P according to Equations 19 and 15.
9. until Equation 10 converges.
10. Return the clustering result recovered from P.

Algorithm 1. LPS (product tree Y, a set of n purchase trees j, the number of clusters c, the number of nearest neighbors k).

bound of the lower bound of h and
set h as the bound:
n H ( )
1 acquire-valued-shoppers-challenge/data)
= max
2 l max H ()dijl
j i
dijl' .
and consists of more than 7 million
i =1 l '=1
(32)
Then h can be tuned by selecting the
proper bi, which is determined by k.
The Optimization Algorithm
The detailed algorithm to solve Equa-
tion 7 is summarized in Algorithm
1. (In practice, can be determined
during the iteration. For example,
we can initialize = l, then increase
if the connected components of
P is smaller than c and decrease
if its greater than c in each itera-
tion.) Given a set of n purchase trees
j, we want to cluster j into c clus-
ters. With a given number of nearest
neighbors k, the k-nearest neighbors
b i for each purchase tree j is formed.
Two regularization parameters l and
h are computed according to Equa-
tions 28 and 32. F, w, and P in Equa-
tion 10 are iteratively solved until
they converge.
Experimental Results
and Analysis
We conducted experiments on six real-
life transaction datasets to investigate
the effectiveness and scalability of the
LPS algorithm. D1 was built from the
Kaggle competition (www.kaggle.com/c/
ing result.
transaction records from 202 cus-
tomers. D2 was built from four years
of a superstores transactional data
(https://community.tableau.com/docs/
DOC-1236) and consists of more
than 8,000 transaction records from
795 customers. D3, D4, D5, and D6
were built from a big supermarkets
data and contain more than 4 mil-
lion transaction records from 2015.
The number of customers in the four
datasets are 1,338, 1,500, 2,000, and
2,676, respectively. The heights of the
purchase trees in the six datasets are
5, 3, 4, 4, 4, and 4, respectively.
Evaluation Methods
Because the PurTree distance de-
pends on the level weights that will
be learned, we propose a normalized
logarithm of within-cluster disper-
sion for evaluating a clustering result,
which is computed as
c from 5 to 100 for c and 20 integers from
1
N L W = log
l =1 2 C l
d ( i , j )
i , j C l
, computed the average level weights
n w for each k and for each c from
log
i , j =1
d ( i , j )
(33)
where {C, ..., Cc} is the clustering re-
sult of c partitions from a purchase
tree dataset = { i }ni =1. The lower
the N LW(c), the better the cluster-
In a social network, modularity is
often used to measure the strength
of a networks division into modules.
Intuitively, it can be used to measure
the quality of a clustering result pro-
duced by a spectral clustering. The
modularity is computed as10
c
si s j
1
Q=
m sij
m
, (34)
l =1 i , j C l , i j
where sij = 1 d(j i, j j), si = nj =1sij ,
and m = ni , j sij . A positive Q indicates
a clustering result better than random
assignment. The higher the Q, the
better the clustering result.
Experimental Results on LPS
We first investigate the relation-
ship among the number of neighbor
trees k, the final number of clusters
c, and the level weights w. In this
experiment, we selected 96 integers
5 to 100 for k to run LPS on D 3. We
these results by LPS (see Figure 1).
From these results, we can see that
the weights didnt change too much

march/april 2017 www.computer.org/intelligent 41

Big Data

1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
0.5 0.5

0.4 0.4

0.3 0.3
Weights

Weights
0.2 0.2

0.1 0.1

0 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 20 40 60 80 100
(a) k (b) C

Figure 1. The relationship among k, c, and level weights: (a) k versus v and (b) c versus v.

0.11 0.15

0.1

0.09
0.1
0.08
Moduality

Moduality

0.07

0.06
0.05
0.05

0.04
0.03 0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 0 20 40 60 80 100
(a) No. of nearest neighbors (b) C

Figure 2. The relationship among k, c, and Q: (a) k versus Q, and (b) c versus Q.

with changes of k and c. These re-
sults are consistent with Theorem 1,
which states that the level weights
decrease with the increase in tree
levels.
The maximal modularity Q was
also computed for each k and c from
LPSs results (see Figure 2). From
these results, we can see that Q in-
creased with the increase of k at the
start, then it became nearly stable af-
ter k 50, indicating that LPS can
produce a good clustering result with
a small k. From Figure 2b, we can see
that there exists a sudden increase of
Q when c = 48, which decreases af-
ter that. Q reached its biggest value
when c = 48, so we select 48 as the
number of clusters to investigate clus-
ter structure.
We select the clustering result with
the highest Q to visually investi-
gate the effectiveness of the LPS al-
gorithms clustering result. We first
computed the paired distances be-
tween trees in D3 and drew the dis-
tance matrix (Figure 3a; each row
and column represent a purchase tree
in the same order, with the darker
color representing lower distance and
the lighter color representing higher
distance). From Figure 3a, we cant
see clearly the cluster structure. To
check whether it can be observed
from the LPS result, we arranged the
tree order such that the trees in the
same cluster were close to each other.
The result is shown in Figure 3b, in
which 48 clusters are placed in order
of decreasing cluster size from left
to right (on the left, two big clusters
each contain more than 400 objects;
on the right, 37 small clusters con-
tain fewer than 10 objects). The small
clusters can be considered as outliers.

42 www.computer.org/intelligent IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

 (a) (b)

Figure 3. Distance matrix on D3: (a) original and (b) 48 clusters recovered by LPS.

Table 1. Comparison results by five clustering algorithms on six datasets.*

Algorithms D1 D2 D3 D4 D5 D6
CHC 0.09(6.11) 0.06(7.46) 0.04(8.00) 0.03(8.11) 0.03(8.36) 0.03(8.69)

DBSCAN 0.17(6.00) 0.12(7.37) 0.02(7.89) 0.04(8.01) 0.02(8.30) 0.00(8.59)

HAC 0.47(6.02) 0.16(7.37) 0.02(7.90) 0.05(8.01) 0.03(8.30) 0.01(8.59)

PurTreeClust 0.47(6.03) 0.16(7.38) 0.02(7.90) 0.05(8.01) 0.03(8.30) 0.01(8.59)

LPS 0.74(7.50) 0.03(7.51) 0.11(7.36) 0.10(7.36) 0.10(8.62) 0.09(8.70)

* The value before brackets is the maximum Q and the value in brackets is the minimum NLW; the maximum Q and minimum NLW on each dataset are rendered in bold.

Comparison Results NLW on four datasets. Especially References

We used all six datasets to compare
the effectiveness of the LPS algorithm
with those of four clustering algo-
rithms: PurTreeClust,9 concept hier-
archy clustering (CHC), hierarchical
agglomerative clustering (HAC), and
DBSCAN with Jaccard distance on
individual items. The same 96 inte-
gers from 5 to 100 were selected for c
to run the three algorithms. For each
clustering algorithm, we computed
the maximum Q and minimum NLW.
Table 1 shows the results; the value
before brackets is the maximum
Q, and the value in brackets is the
minimum NLW. From these results,
we can see that LPS produced the high-
est Q on five datasets and the lowest
on D1, D5, and D 6, LPS significantly
outperforms all other algorithms in
terms of Q and NLW.
I n future work, well improve the
weighting technique used in dis-
tance by weighting individual tree
nodes instead of tree levels. It will be
interesting to apply this method in
clustering other objects embedded in
a tree.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by NSFC un-
der grant no. 61305059, 61473194, and
61472258 and Natural Science Foundation
of SZU (grant no. 201432).
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The Authors
Xiaojun Chen is a lecturer in the College of Computer Science and Software at Shenzhen
University. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, and pattern rec-
ognition. Contact him at xjchen@szu.edu.cn.
Si Peng is a masters student in the College of Computer Science and Software at Shen-
zhen University. Her research interests focus on clustering. Contact her at 2150230405@
email.szu.edu.cn.
Joshua Zhexue Huang is a professor in the College of Computer Science and Software at
Shenzhen University. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, and
pattern recognition. Contact him at zx.huang@szu.edu.cn.
Feiping Nie is a professor in the College of Computer Science and Software at Shenzhen
University. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, pattern recogni-
tion, and computer vision. Contact him at feipingnie@gmail.com.
Yong Ming is a masters student in the College of Computer Science and Software at Shenzhen
University. His research interests focus on clustering. Contact him at 948325572@qq.com.
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