Inference of Population Hierarchical Cluster of Customer Needs

Author

Shun Takai, Missouri University of Science and TechnologyFollow
Kosuke Ishii

Abstract

In product development, engineers first collect customer needs and then group similar needs to identify a small number of representative needs. Engineers transfer these representative needs to target product requirements and develop products that fulfill these requirements. In grouping similar needs, engineers use affinity diagram, which is a popular consensus-based method, or subjective clustering, which is a statistical method. This paper applies bootstrap to subjective clustering in order to assist engineers make an inference about the population cluster of customer needs. This paper presents a procedure for bootstrap application to subjective clustering, a preliminary experiment, and an illustrative example.

Recommended Citation

S. Takai and K. Ishii, "Inference of Population Hierarchical Cluster of Customer Needs," Proceedings of 2005 ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Jan 2005.

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Bootstrap; Customer Needs; Hierarchical Clustering; Subjective Clustering

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2005 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2005