Monitoring of Customer Segment Dynamics Using Clustering and Event-Based Alerts
Continuous customer activity generated by modern digital platforms drives the evolution of behavioral segments over time. Traditional customer segmentation methods typically rely on periodic batch analysis of historical data, producing static snapshots that may quickly become outdated and fail to capture emerging behavioral patterns. This paper presents a monitoring-oriented framework for detecting customer segment evolution and generating timely notifications about meaningful structural changes in the customer population. The proposed system continuously ingests user activity events, incrementally updates customer profiles, and periodically recomputes behavioral segments using fixed-k KMeans clustering over standardized recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) features. To improve robustness and interpretability, the framework incorporates adaptive event scoring, stability-aware segment validation, drift-aware centroid matching, and persistence-based filtering of transient changes. These mechanisms reduce noisy alerts caused by repeated clustering updates while preserving meaningful signals about evolving customer behavior. The framework is evaluated on the Online Retail II and Instacart datasets under streaming simulation conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed approach maintains stable clustering structures, identifies persistent segment changes, and uncovers economically meaningful customer groups. Compared with static segmentation and periodic clustering baselines, the framework improves clustering quality while enabling continuous monitoring of segment evolution. Overall, the results suggest that adaptive monitoring can extend traditional customer segmentation into a practical continuous analytics process for moderate-scale dynamic environments.
Authors
- Giannis Vassiliou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9305-8570)
- Sotiris Batsakis (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6023-2311)
- Stavroula Chatzinikolaou
- Nikos Papadakis
- Efstratia Vasileiou
Institutions
- Mediterranean University (ME)
- ATEbank (Greece) (GR)
- Alpha Marine (Greece) (GR)
- University of the Aegean (GR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Computers
- Published
- 2026-04-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/computers15050276
- Primary Topic
- Customer churn and segmentation
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00