Predictive modeling of consumer financial behavior, including
determination of likely responses to particular marketing efforts, is
provided by application of consumer transaction data to predictive models
associated with merchant segments, which are derived from the consumer
transaction data based on co-occurrences of merchants in sequences of
transactions. Merchant vectors represent specific merchants, and are
aligned in a vector space as a function of the degree to which the
merchants co-occur. Supervised segmentation is applied to merchant
vectors to form merchant segments. Merchant segment predictive models
provide predictions of spending in each merchant segment for any
particular consumer, based on previous spending by the consumer. Consumer
profiles describe summary statistics of each consumer's spending in the
merchant segments, and across merchant segments. Consumer profiles
include consumer vectors derived as summary vectors of selected merchants
patronized by the consumer. Predictions of consumer behavior are made by
applying nearest-neighbor analysis to consumer vectors.