A rough set based data mining approach for house of quality analysis

As the first phase of quality function deployment (QFD) and the only interface between the customers and product development team, house of quality (HOQ) plays the most important role in developing quality products that are able to satisfy customer needs. No matter in what shape or form HOQ can be built, the key to this process is to find out the hidden relationship between customers' requirements and product design specifications. This paper presents a general rough set based data mining approach for HOQ analysis. It utilises the historical information of customer needs and the design specifications of the product that was purchased, employs the basic rough set notions to reveal the interrelationships between customer needs and design specifications automatically. Due to the data reduction nature of the approach, a minimal set of customer needs that are crucial for the decision on the correlated design specifications is derived. The end result of the approach is in the form of a minimal rule set, which not only fulfils the goal of HOQ, but can be used as supporting data for marketing purposes. A case study on the product of electrically powered bicycles is included to illustrate the approach and its efficiency.