<![CDATA[The retail industry generates an extremely large and continuously growing volume of transactional data along with the advancement of digital technology, thereby requiring sophisticated and systematic data analysis approaches to support effective and evidence-based business decision-making. This study aims to analyze retail sales data by utilizing the Retail Sales Dataset obtained from the Kaggle platform, which consists of 100,000 transaction records and broadly represents the characteristics of retail transactions. The main focus of this study is to classify product categories and predict customer segments, including the identification of high-spending customers (high spenders), based on demographic attributes such as age and gender, as well as various transaction-related features. The research methodology includes data preprocessing, label encoding, and feature engineering to generate additional variables, including Age_Group, Is_Holiday, and Spender_Group, which are expected to enhance the predictive capability of the models. Several machine learning algorithms, namely Decision Tree, Random Forest, and XGBoost, were implemented and evaluated to compare their respective performance. The experimental results indicate that multiclass product category classification achieves relatively low accuracy, ranging from 27% to 34%. These findings suggest the high complexity of retail data and highlight the need for further model optimization, class balancing techniques, and feature refinement to improve predictive performance in future studies.]]>
