Trend mining for predictive product design

The Preference Trend Mining (PTM) algorithm that we propose 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 generate 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 obsolete, nonstandard or standard, with the appropriate classification given 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). A cell phone example containing 12 time stamped data sets (January 2009-December 2009) is used to validate the proposed Preference Trend Mining model and compare it to traditional demand modeling techniques for predictive accuracy and ease of model generation.