Detecting multi-timescale consumption patterns from receipt data: a non-negative tensor factorization approach

Understanding consumer behavior is an important task, not only for developing marketing strategies but also for the management of economic policies. Detecting consumption patterns, however, is a high-dimensional problem in which various factors that would affect consumers’ behavior need to be considered, such as consumers’ demographics, circadian rhythm, seasonal cycles, etc. Here, we develop a method to extract multi-timescale expenditure patterns of consumers from a large dataset of scanned receipts. We use a non-negative tensor factorization (NTF) to detect intra- and inter-week consumption patterns at one time. The proposed method allows us to characterize consumers based on their consumption patterns that are correlated over different timescales.