Trend Mining for Predictive Product Design

The Preference Trend Mining (PTM) algorithm that is proposed in this work aims to address some fundamental challenges of current demand modeling techniques being employed in the product design community. The first contribution is a multistage predictive modeling approach that captures changes in consumer preferences (as they relate to product design) over time, hereby enabling design engineers to anticipate next generation product features before they become mainstream/unimportant. Because consumer preferences may exhibit monotonically increasing or decreasing, seasonal, or unobservable trends, we proposed employing a statistical trend detection technique to help detect time series attribute patterns. A time series exponential smoothing technique is then used to forecast future attribute trend patterns and generates a demand model that reflects emerging product preferences over time. The second contribution of this work is a novel classification scheme for attributes that have low predictive power and hence may be omitted from a predictive model. We propose classifying such attributes as either standard, nonstandard, or obsolete by assigning the appropriate classification based on the time series entropy values that an attribute exhibits. By modeling attribute irrelevance, design engineers can determine when to retire certain product features (deemed obsolete) or incorporate others into the actual product architecture (standard) while developing modules for those attributes exhibiting inconsistent patterns throughout time (nonstandard). Several time series data sets using publicly available data are used to validate the proposed preference trend mining model and compared it to traditional demand modeling techniques for predictive accuracy and ease of model generation.