Integration of self-organizing feature maps neural network and genetic K-means algorithm for market segmentation

This study is dedicated to proposing a novel two-stage method, which first uses Self-Organizing Feature Maps (SOM) neural network to determine the number of clusters and the starting point, and then uses genetic K-means algorithm to find the final solution. The results of simulated data via a Monte Carlo study show that the proposed method outperforms two other methods. K-means and SOM followed by K-means (Kuo, Ho & Hu, 2002a), based on both within-cluster variations (SSW) and the number of misclassification. In order to further demonstrate the proposed approach's capability, a real-world problem of the fright transport industry market segmentation is employed. A questionnaire is designed and surveyed, after which factor analysis extracts the factors from the questionnaire items as the basis of market segmentation. Then the proposed method is used to cluster the customers. The results also indicate that the proposed method is better than the other two methods (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.