Zooming back out, and hiding all the rarely-bought items and weak connections gives us an overview of the central, highly complex island. We see some of the patterns occurring elsewhere - linked discounted hardware items and plumbing items. We see expensive linked pieces of lumber (the solid square nodes in the display) and we also see a very expensive piece of lawn/garden equipment just top-right of center. We have just started exploring this data set. We have a set of qualitative results and questions for further analysis. There are many paths we could take to delve deeper into this example. Here are a few questions we could try answering:

• Who is buying discounted hardware items together? Is it contractors (few items, but large numbers of them bought) or the general public (maybe more items, usually only buys one of each type of hammer!)

• Why do plumbing and electrical departments have strongly different discount and buying patterns? It seems they should be selling to the same type of customer, so why are the patterns so dissimilar?

• What sort of items do people who buy expensive lawn tractors also buy? Can we use those items to entice them to buy tractors?

• Noting the inter-departmental connections, does the store layout reflect these patterns?

• Discounting which items would lead to the greatest increase in sales for items bought on the same receipts as these items? Is there a consistent and actionable pattern among them?