Extracting Features
Sometimes, the most interesting features are the descriptions of products and channels, markets and retailers. These descriptions include more complex data types, such as text and geographic position. This section discusses some ideas about extracting information for geographic and character data types.
Geographic Location Information
Geographic location information is represented as latitudes and longitudes, and perhaps as geographic hierarchies. When mapped, this information is quite interesting. However, maps do not fit well into customer signatures nor are they well-suited for most statistical and data mining algorithms.
Longitudes and latitudes are generated by geocoding addresses or by reading positioning information on a mobile device. The most obvious address is the customer address. However, there are addresses for retailers, and ATM machines, and mobile phones, and city centers, and Internet service provider points-of-presence, and so on. Such geocoding...