---
license: mit
---

# Dataset Card for CDNOW Dataset

## Dataset Summary

The **CDNOW dataset** is a well-known dataset in customer analytics and predictive modeling, especially used in the context of **Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)** estimation and **Buy Till You Die (BTYD)** models. This dataset consists of detailed transaction logs from a CD retailer (CDNOW) for a sample of customers, along with anonymized demographic data.

It is often used in research and teaching materials for modeling purchasing behavior, including techniques like Pareto/NBD, BG/NBD, and Gamma-Gamma models.

## Dataset Structure

The dataset is composed of two main CSV files:

### `purchases.csv`

| Column    | Description                                 |
|-----------|---------------------------------------------|
| users_id  | Unique ID for each customer                 |
| date      | Date of purchase (YYYY-MM-DD format)        |
| cds       | Number of CDs bought in a single purchase   |
| amt       | Total dollar amount spent in the purchase   |

### `customers.csv`

| Column       | Description                                      |
|--------------|--------------------------------------------------|
| id           | Customer ID (matches `users_id` in purchases)    |
| zone         | U.S. sales region                                |
| state        | Customer's state                                 |
| gender       | Gender of the customer                           |
| age_category | Categorical label for customer's age group       |
| age          | Customer's age in years                          |

## Supported Tasks and Benchmarks

- **Customer Segmentation**
- **Churn Prediction**
- **CLV Modeling**
- **RFM Analysis**
- **Marketing Attribution**

This dataset is suitable for supervised and unsupervised learning tasks related to customer behavior analysis.

## Languages

Not language-dependent; numeric and categorical data only.

## Source Information

The CDNOW dataset was originally made publicly available as part of a research project on CLV modeling by:

> **Fader, Peter S., and Bruce GS Hardie. "Customer-Base Valuation in a Contractual Setting: The Perils of Ignoring Heterogeneity."** Marketing Science 29.1 (2010): 85-93.

It has since been widely used in textbooks and academic courses on marketing analytics, such as:

- *"Customer Centricity"* by Peter Fader  
- *"Data Science for Business"* by Provost and Fawcett

## Citation

If you use this dataset, consider citing the following:

```txt
@article{fader2010customer, title={Customer-Base Valuation in a Contractual Setting: The Perils of Ignoring Heterogeneity}, author={Fader, Peter S and Hardie, Bruce GS}, journal={Marketing Science}, volume={29}, number={1}, pages={85--93}, year={2010}, publisher={INFORMS} }
```