Problem Formulation

Consider the following scenario. A store wants to examine its customer base and to understand which of its products tend to be purchased together. It has chosen to conduct a market basket analysis on a sample of its customers.
The ASSOCS data set lists 20 grocery products that are purchased by 1,001 customers. Seven items were purchased by each of the 1,001 customers, which yields 7,007 rows in the input data set. Each row of the data set represents a customer-product combination. In most data sets, not all customers have the same number of products.