license: mit
Dataset Card for CDNOW Dataset
Dataset Summary
The CDNOW dataset is a well-known dataset in customer analytics and predictive modeling, especially used in the context of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) estimation and Buy Till You Die (BTYD) models. This dataset consists of detailed transaction logs from a CD retailer (CDNOW) for a sample of customers, along with anonymized demographic data.
It is often used in research and teaching materials for modeling purchasing behavior, including techniques like Pareto/NBD, BG/NBD, and Gamma-Gamma models.
Dataset Structure
The dataset is composed of two main CSV files:
purchases.csv
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| users_id | Unique ID for each customer |
| date | Date of purchase (YYYY-MM-DD format) |
| cds | Number of CDs bought in a single purchase |
| amt | Total dollar amount spent in the purchase |
customers.csv
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| id | Customer ID (matches users_id in purchases) |
| zone | U.S. sales region |
| state | Customer's state |
| gender | Gender of the customer |
| age_category | Categorical label for customer's age group |
| age | Customer's age in years |
Supported Tasks and Benchmarks
- Customer Segmentation
- Churn Prediction
- CLV Modeling
- RFM Analysis
- Marketing Attribution
This dataset is suitable for supervised and unsupervised learning tasks related to customer behavior analysis.
Languages
Not language-dependent; numeric and categorical data only.
Source Information
The CDNOW dataset was originally made publicly available as part of a research project on CLV modeling by:
Fader, Peter S., and Bruce GS Hardie. "Customer-Base Valuation in a Contractual Setting: The Perils of Ignoring Heterogeneity." Marketing Science 29.1 (2010): 85-93.
It has since been widely used in textbooks and academic courses on marketing analytics, such as:
- "Customer Centricity" by Peter Fader
- "Data Science for Business" by Provost and Fawcett
Citation
If you use this dataset, consider citing the following:
@article{fader2010customer, title={Customer-Base Valuation in a Contractual Setting: The Perils of Ignoring Heterogeneity}, author={Fader, Peter S and Hardie, Bruce GS}, journal={Marketing Science}, volume={29}, number={1}, pages={85--93}, year={2010}, publisher={INFORMS} }