EXCLUSIVE ORE INTRODUCES XAffinity

Exclusive Ore announced the June 2000 release of XAffinity, innovative software for identifying affinities or patterns in transaction and click stream data. XAffinity is database enabled, and goes farther than most inplace 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. This approach is very similar to the approach recommended in the proposed OLE DB for DM recently published by Microsoft.

"One of the long-standing problems of affinity and sequence analysis is the massive amount of data that must be examined and the vast quantity of rules which are output. This is particularly true in analyzing click stream data. XAffinity attempts to alleviate both these problem through tight integration with the database," said Rob Gerritsen, president of Exclusive Ore. The indatabase approach allows our users to "leverage the power of the DBMS server by using it to analyze transactions or click stream data. Because the resulting rules are also placed in the database, it is easy for both the model developer and others to browse and explore the rules with standard OLAP tools. Another distinct advantage of our in-database approach is that we can support data mining on a large number of servers, independent of the server OS, because the commands are passed to the server in the form of SQL commands," Gerritsen said.

XAffinity was designed to provide exceptional flexibility for association and sequence pattern detection and analysis. For those who analyze click stream data, most often what is interesting is not a single rule, but how behavior differs between visitors who buy and those who don't, or between days of the week. XAffinity's automatic partitioning and rule discriminator extend classic association and sequence rule discovery by discovering rules across a partitioning variable, such as day of week or type of customer. The rule discriminator identified 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.

Whether traditional retail or e-commerce, XAffinity finds affinities that enables retailers and e-tailers to

• Plan what to promote
• Evaluate a campaign's impact
• Plan effective coupon and discounting strategies
• Identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities

In an e-commerce environment, XAffinity extends these capabilities by discovering relationships between page visits and purchases and answer questions like:

• Are the best cross-sell opportunities on the weekend the same or different than those on weekdays?
• Which page visits correlate positively with purchases?
• Which page visits correlate negatively with purchases?
• Which additional products should be recommended after a product has been selected for purchase?

XAffinity will be available both as an end-user application for marketers and Web analysts, and as an ActiveX component for building turn-key e-commerce applications. Additional information about XAffinity can be found on the Exclusive Ore Web site at www.xore.com.

About Exclusive Ore

Exclusive Ore Inc was founded in 1997 as a consulting and software services company whose sole emphasis was the delivery of quality data mining solutions. Since that time, Exclusive Ore has successfully implemented solutions in a wide variety of industries including Telco, Retail, Finance, and Consumer Packaged Goods.

Contact Rob Gerritsen of Exclusive Ore, 215-643-3110.