Market Basket Analysis

We experimented with trying to determine which authors or titles tend to occur together in borrowers' histories. For example, if someone borrowed a book by Charles King, what other books was he or she likely to borrow? (see Wikipedia for how this is done).

In the visualizations, authors or titles are represented by circles (mouseover a circle to see which author or title it prepresents). If authors or titles are connected by a line, then they tend to occur in borrowers' histories (click a circle to see which authors or titles it tends to occur with). Circle size is relative to how often authors or titles were borrowed.

We don't think this analysis is perfect. For example, in the author graphs for male borrowers, Horatio Alger usually connects to everything, or almost so, because males borrowed a huge amount of Alger. The result isn't surprising. But it would be nice to have a finer-grained view into male reading habits. And the actual patterns of reading are more diffuse than these visualizations suggest.

And in what follows there's also quite a bit of adjusting of cut-off levels in order to produce reasonable visualizations. To some extent, this is to be expected, since at some level of detail the behavior of the Muncie readers seems as much inchoate as patterned.

Despite the lack of perfection in these analyses, it's not too hard to find interesting differences between male, female and age-group reading, and especially between young male and female readers.

Authors

Everyone
Everyone 14 years old and younger
Everyone 15 to 19 years old
Everyone 20 to 29
Everyone 30 to 39
Everyone 40 to 49
Everyone 50 and older

All women
Women 14 years old and younger
Women 15 to 19 years old
Women 20 to 29
Women 30 to 39
Women 40 to 49
Women 50 and older

All men
Men 14 years old and younger
Men 15 to 19 years old
men 20 to 29
Men 30 to 39
Men 40 to 49
Men 50 and older

Titles

Everyone
Everyone 14 years old and younger
Everyone 15 to 19 years old
Everyone 20 to 29
Everyone 30 to 39
Everyone 40 to 49
Everyone 50 and older

All women
Women 14 years old and younger
Women 15 to 19 years old
Women 20 to 29
Women 30 to 39
Women 40 to 49
Women 50 and older

All men
Men 14 years old and younger
Men 15 to 19 years old
Men 20 to 29
Men 30 to 39
Men 40 to 49
Men 50 and older