Setting Options for the RFM Aggregate Node

The Settings tab of the RFM Aggregate node contains the following fields.

Calculate Recency relative to Specify the date from which the recency of transactions will be calculated. This may be either a Fixed date that you enter, or Today's date, as set by your system. Today's date is entered by default and is automatically updated when the node is executed.

Note: The display of the Fixed date may be different for different locales. For example, if the value 2007-8-10 is stored in your stream as Fri Aug 10 00:00:00 CST 2007 it is a time and date in the time zone 'UTC+8'. However, it displays as Thu Aug 9 12:00:00 EDT 2007 in the time zone 'UTC-8'.

IDs are contiguous If your data are presorted so that all records with the same ID appear together in the data stream, select this option to speed up processing. If your data are not presorted (or you are not sure), leave this option unselected, and the node will sort the data automatically.

ID Select the field to be used to identify the customer and their transactions. To display the fields from which you can select, use the Field Chooser button on the right.

Date Select the date field to be used to calculate recency against. To display the fields from which you can select, use the Field Chooser button on the right.

Note that this requires a field with a storage of date, or timestamp, in the appropriate format to use as input. For example, if you have a string field with values like Jan 2007, Feb 2007, and so on, you can convert this to a date field using a Filler node and the to_date() function. See the topic Storage Conversion Using the Filler Node for more information.

Value Select the field to be used to calculate the total monetary value of the customer's transactions. To display the fields from which you can select, use the Field Chooser button on the right. Note: This must be a numeric value.

New field name extension Select to append either a suffix or prefix, such as "12_month", to the newly generated recency, frequency, and monetary fields. Select Suffix or Prefix to indicate your preferred extension style. For example, this may be useful when examining several time periods.

Discard records with value below If required, you can specify a minimum value below which any transaction details are not used when calculating the RFM totals. The units of value relate to the Value field selected.

Include only recent transactions If you are analyzing a large database, you can specify that only the latest records are used. You can chose to use the data recorded either after a certain date or within a recent period:

Transaction date after Specify the transaction date after which records will be included in your analysis.
Transaction within the last Specify the number and type of periods (days, weeks, months, or years) back from the Calculate recency relative to date after which records will be included in your analysis.

Save date of second most recent transaction If you want to know the date of the second most recent transaction for each customer, select this box. In addition, you can then select the Save date of third most recent transaction box as well. For example, this can help you identify customers who may have carried out many transactions some considerable time ago, but only one recent transaction.