Improving Accuracy and Performance of Customer Churn Prediction Using Feature Reduction Algorithms
Keywords:
Feature Reduction, Feature Selection, Customer Churn Prediction,Abstract
Prediction of customer churn is one of the most essential activities in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). However, the state-of-the-art of the customer churn prediction approach only focuses on the classifier selection in improving the accuracy and performance of churn prediction, but rarely contemplate the feature reduction algorithms. Furthermore, there are numerous attributes that contribute to customer churn and it is crucial to determine the most substantial features in order to acquire the highest prediction accuracy and to improve the prediction performance. Feature reduction decreases the dimensionality of the information and may allow learning algorithms to function faster and more effectively and able to produce predictive models that deliver the highest rate of accuracy. In this research, we investigated and proposed two (2) different feature reduction algorithms which are Correlation based Feature Selection (CFS) and Information Gain (IG) and built classification models based on three 3) different classifiers, namely Bayes Net, Simple Logistic and Decision Table. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of classifiers improves with the application of features reduction of the customer churn data set. A CFS feature reduction algorithm with the Decision Table classifier yields the highest accuracy of 92.08% and has the lowest RMSE of 0.2554. This study recommends the use of feature reduction algorithms in the context of CRM for churn prediction to improve accuracy and performance of customer churn prediction.References
Christopher, M., & Peck, H. 2012. Marketing logistics. Routledge.
Verhoef, P. C., & Lemon, K. N. 2013. Successful customer value management: Key lessons and emerging trends. European
Management Journal, 31(1), 1-15.
Ismail, M. R., Awang, M. K., Rahman, M. N. A., & Makhtar, M. 2015. A Multi-Layer Perceptron Approach for Customer Churn Prediction. International Journal of Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering,10(7), 213-222.
Awang, M. K., Rahman, M. N. A., & Ismail, M. R. 2012. Data Mining for Churn Prediction: Multiple Regression Approach. In Computer Applications for Database, Education, and Ubiquitous Computing. Springer Berlin Heidelberg: 318-324.
Coussement, K., Benoit, D. F., & Van den Poel, D. 2010. Improved marketing decision making in a customer churn prediction context using generalized additive models. Expert systems with Applications, 37(3): 2132-2143.
De Bock, K. W., & Van den Poel, D. 2011. An empirical evaluation of rotation-based ensemble classifiers for customer churn prediction. Expert Systems with Applications, 38(10): 12293-12301.
Shaaban, E., Helmy, Y., Khedr, A., & Nasr, M. 2012. A proposed churn prediction model. IJERA, 2: 693-697.
Wang, Y., Sanguansintukul, S., & Lursinsap, C. 2008. The customer lifetime value prediction in mobile telecommunications. In Management of Innovation and Technology, 2008. ICMIT 2008. 4th IEEE International Conference on IEEE. 565-569.
Huang, B., Kechadi, M. T., & Buckley, B. 2012. Customer churn prediction in telecommunications. Expert Systems with Applications, 39(1): 1414-1425.
Khan, A. A., Jamwal, S., & Sepehri, M. M. 2010. Applying data mining to customer churn prediction in an internet service provider. International Journal of Computer Applications, 9(7): 8-14.
Coussement, K., Benoit, D. F., & Van den Poel, D. 2015. Preventing customers from running away! Exploring generalized additive models for customer churn prediction. In The Sustainable Global Marketplace. Springer International Publishing; 238-238.
Chandrashekar, G., & Sahin, F. 2014. A survey on feature selection methods. Computers & Electrical Engineering, 40(1): 16-28.
Hall, M. A. 1999. Correlation-based feature selection for machine learning (Doctoral dissertation, The University of Waikato).
Guyon, I., & Elisseeff, A. 2003. An introduction to variable and feature selection. The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3: 1157-1182.
Hall, M., Frank, E., Holmes, G., Pfahringer, B., Reutemann, P., & Witten, I. H. 2009. The WEKA data mining software: an update. ACM SIGKDD explorations newsletter, 11(1): 10-18.
Sumner, M., Frank, E., & Hall, M. (2005). Speeding up logistic model tree induction. In Knowledge Discovery in Databases: PKDD 2005. Springer Berlin Heidelberg: 675-683.
Kohavi, R. 1995. The power of decision tables. In Machine Learning: ECML-95. Springer Berlin Heidelberg: 174-18
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
TRANSFER OF COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT
The manuscript is herewith submitted for publication in the Journal of Telecommunication, Electronic and Computer Engineering (JTEC). It has not been published before, and it is not under consideration for publication in any other journals. It contains no material that is scandalous, obscene, libelous or otherwise contrary to law. When the manuscript is accepted for publication, I, as the author, hereby agree to transfer to JTEC, all rights including those pertaining to electronic forms and transmissions, under existing copyright laws, except for the following, which the author(s) specifically retain(s):
- All proprietary right other than copyright, such as patent rights
- The right to make further copies of all or part of the published article for my use in classroom teaching
- The right to reuse all or part of this manuscript in a compilation of my own works or in a textbook of which I am the author; and
- The right to make copies of the published work for internal distribution within the institution that employs me
I agree that copies made under these circumstances will continue to carry the copyright notice that appears in the original published work. I agree to inform my co-authors, if any, of the above terms. I certify that I have obtained written permission for the use of text, tables, and/or illustrations from any copyrighted source(s), and I agree to supply such written permission(s) to JTEC upon request.