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. The merchant segments 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 more or less frequently than expected. Supervised
segmentation is applied to merchant vectors to form the 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. The 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, thus facilitating the
targeting of promotional offers to consumers most likely to respond
positively.