Chapter Profiling visitors of a national park in Italy through unsupervised classification of mixed data

• Main Author: Caruso, Giulia (auth)
• Other Authors: Evangelista, Adelia (auth), Gattone, Stefano Antonio (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Florence Firenze University Press 2021
• Series: Proceedings e report 127
• Subjects: Social research & statistics; Cluster analysis; mixed data; unsupervised learning; customers profiling
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

Cluster analysis has for long been an effective tool for analysing data. Thus, several disciplines, such as marketing, psychology and computer sciences, just to mention a few, did take advantage from its contribution over time. Traditionally, this kind of algorithm concentrates only on numerical or categorical data at a time. In this work, instead, we analyse a dataset composed of mixed data, namely both numerical than categorical ones. More precisely, we focus on profiling visitors of the National Park of Majella in the Abruzzo region of Italy, which observations are characterized by variables such as gender, age, profession, expectations and satisfaction rate on park services. Applying a standard clustering procedure would be wholly inappropriate in this case. Therefore, we hereby propose an unsupervised classification of mixed data, a specific procedure capable of processing both numerical than categorical variables simultaneously, releasing truly precious information. In conclusion, our application therefore emphasizes how cluster analysis for mixed data can lead to discover particularly informative patterns, allowing to lay the groundwork for an accurate customers profiling, starting point for a detailed marketing analysis.