A Dominance-based Rough Set Approach to customer behavior in the airline market

Market segmentation is a crucial activity in the present business environment. Data mining is a useful tool for identifying customer behavior patterns in large amounts of data. This information can then be used to help with decision-making in areas such as the airline market. In this study, we use the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) to provide a set of rules for determining customer attitudes and loyalties, which can help managers develop strategies to acquire new customers and retain highly valued ones. A set of rules is derived from a large sample of international airline customers, and its predictive ability is evaluated. The results, as compared with those of multiple discriminate analyses, are very encouraging. They prove the usefulness of the proposed method in predicting the behavior of airline customers. This study demonstrates that the DRSA model helps to identify customers, determine their characteristics, and facilitate the development of a marketing strategy. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.