Continued Data Mining Research in Support of Big Data Retail Analytics

J. D. Irving (JDI) , a major Canadian corporation located in Atlantic Canada, and the Institute for Big DataAnalytics at Dalhousie University (IBDA), a regional Data Science centre of excellence, propose to continuetheir research initiated under the successful NSERC Engage grant during the period March-August, 2014.During a recently finished NSERC Engage project with JDI we have developed procedures for analyzing thePOS data on sales of facial tissue across Canada and merging it with the basic demographic and health dataavailable from public and select corporate sources. We propose to continue this research under the Engage Plussupport in the directions described below, with the goal of building a Collaborative Research and Developmentapplication at the end of the Engage Plus support. We have identified two main areas of promising research: 1)building mappings between different tessallations in which various datasets are given, and 2) integration ofdifferent external data sources with the POS data. We will develop our solution into a prototype systemcombining analytics and visualization, usable by the partner in cooperation with the research team.