CT077-3-2-DSTR Lab Work #1 + Solution Work Page 1 of 5
Level 2 Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation 2025
ANALYSING CUSTOMER BEHAVIOUR IN E-COMMERCE
USING SEARCH AND SORT ALGORITHMS
(Working Duration: Monday of Week 5 to Monday of Week 10 – 30 Marks)
Background:
E-commerce has revolutionized the retail industry, enabling customers to purchase products
online with ease. With millions of transactions happening daily, understanding customer
behavior is essential for businesses to improve user experience, predict sales trends, and detect
fraudulent activities.
One of the key challenges in e-commerce is efficiently managing and processing vast
amounts of customer data, including purchase histories, product reviews, and browsing
behavior. The ability to search for specific transactions and sort large datasets efficiently
is crucial for optimizing business operations.
Data structures play a vital role in these processes. Arrays and linked lists are fundamental
data structures that can be used to store and manage e-commerce data, while different
searching and sorting algorithms determine the efficiency of retrieving and analyzing
information.
In this assignment, your goal is to evaluate how different search and sorting algorithms perform
when processing e-commerce customer data and explore how the choice of data structure, such
as array or linked list, affects performance in terms of time and memory efficiency.
Question:
In this assignment, you are provided with two datasets:
• transactions.csv – Contains customer transaction details (Customer ID, Product, Price,
Date, Category, Payment Method).
• reviews.csv – Contains customer reviews for various products (Product ID, Customer
ID, Rating, Review Text).
You are required to apply various search and sort algorithms to analyse these datasets and
answer the following:
1. How can you efficiently sort customer transactions by date and display the total number of
transactions in both datasets?
2. What percentage of purchases in the “Electronics” category were made using Credit Card
payments?
(Hint: You will need to search and filter transactions based on category and payment method.)
3. Which words are most frequently used in product reviews rated 1-star?
(Hint: Extract the most common words, sort them by frequency, and present the results.)
