This paper by Assistant Professor Catherine Yang and co-author Chunhui Hao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences addresses a very important question—how to select the right products to promote in order to maximize promotional benefit.

This paper sets up a framework to incorporate promotion decisions into the data-mining process, formulate the profit maximization problem as an optimization problem, and propose a heuristic search solution to discover the right products to promote. Moreover, the authors are able to get access to real supermarket data and apply our solution to help achieve higher profits. These experimental results on both synthetic data and real supermarket data demonstrate that this framework and method are highly effective and can potentially bring huge profit gains to a marketing campaign.