Dataset reference

Wholesale Customers

Annual spending across product categories for customers of a wholesale distributor.

Dataset overview

Rows440
Features6 spend fields
TaskClustering
Missing valuesNone

Before training

Inspect missing values, verify target availability, remove leakage and identifiers, split before fitting transformations, and choose metrics that fit the intended decision.

Data quality checks

Confirm row meaning, duplicates, impossible values, category spelling, target balance, and whether the sample represents the population where the model will be used.

Validation planning

Use random holdout only when rows are independent. Prefer grouped, temporal, or geographic splits when related observations could cross the boundary.

Peer-reviewed reference

Research context

Punj & Stewart (1983), Cluster Analysis in Marketing Research: Review and Suggestions for Application, Journal of Marketing Research.

Open journal article

From data to a tested model