Software

01/14/02, Blue Bell, PA. Exclusive Ore Releases XAffinity® 3.0 Database enabled data mining for analysis of market basket and click stream data.

Contact: Estelle Brand, estelle@xore.com, (215) 643-3110

Exclusive Ore (www.exclusiveore.com) announced the official release of XAffinity® 3.0, the latest version of its associations and sequencing software for identifying affinities or patterns in transaction and click stream data.

Initially released in June 2000, XAffinity® was one of the first data mining products to be database enabled, and goes farther than most in-place mining tools in terms of database integration. Not only is mining done directly from database tables or views, but SQL is used to analyze the data and place the mining results back into the database, allowing analysts to browse the rules with standard report and OLAP tools.

XAffinity® provides exceptional flexibility for association and sequence pattern detection and analysis, including innovative extensions to classic associations and sequencing. Key among these are automatic partitioning to allow for easy generation of rules across segments such as day of week or customer type and the rule discriminator which assists in identifying the rules that vary the most, by lift, confidence or support, across the partitioning variable.

For sequence analysis, XAffinity® supports multiple time period dependencies – later, next visit, and interval – as well as complete interval flexibility down to the second, or even fraction of a second; “a must for effective click stream analysis” said Rob Gerritsen, President of Exclusive Ore.

New features of XAffinity® 3.0 facilitate exploration of rules and expand the types of problems that can be addressed and the data formats that can be analyzed.

• Expanded input alternatives to allow processing of input data from text files.
• Support for both "horizontal format" and "vertical format" data. The vertical format, most typical in POS or retail sales, can be seen as looking for associations between rows. In the horizontal format, a single transaction or ‘basket’ will be represented in a single row and the associations will be between columns. A unique hybrid format, associations between rows and columns, is also supported.
• Visualizer to permit interactive visual exploration, filtering and prioritizing of rules by measures and items.
• Parameterized rule text to allow user control over text rule formats so that natural language rules can be specific to the semantics of an application and/or in any language.
• Data type extensions for transaction and item keys and improved diagnostics for unsupported data types.

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