________________________________________________________________________The apparel industry aims to produce comfortable and aesthetically pleasing garments that fit populations well. However, repeated studies of apparel customers' levels of satisfaction indicate that their needs are often not being met. In order to produce better fitting clothes, it is crucial to understand the body profiles of typical consumers. Exploring the demographic profiles of correctly identified customer segments holds obvious benefit for production, marketing and ensuring return on investments. To this end, we explore a database, containing anthropometric measurements, demographic profiles and 3-D body scans, of samples of the North American, Italian and Dutch populations. Through the use of objective interestingness measures-based feature selection and feature extraction, we accurately discover the relevant subsets of body measurements that require special care when designing clothes. Furthermore, we apply association analysis to the demographic data, in order to target customers and thus potentially defining new market opportunities.

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Abstract:In the apparel industry, an important challenge is to produce garments that fit various populations well. However, repeated studies of customers' levels of satisfaction indicate that this is often not the case. The following questions come to mind. What, then, are the typical body profiles of a population? Are there significant differences between populations, and if so, which body measurements need special care when e.g. designing garments for Italian females? Within a population, would it be possible to identify the measurements that are of importance for different sizes and genders? Furthermore, assume that we have access to an accurate anthropometric database. Would there be a way to guide the data mining process to discover only those body measurements that are of the most interest for apparel designers? This paper describes our results when addressing these questions. To this end, we explore a database, containing anthropometric measurements and 3-D body scans, of samples of the North American, Italian and Dutch populations. Our results show that we accurately discover the relevant subsets of body measurements, through the use of objective interestingness measures-based feature selection and feature extraction, for the various body sizes within each population and gender.

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