Stacking Ensemble Approach for Churn Prediction: Integrating CNN and Machine Learning Models with CatBoost Meta-Learner

In the telecom industry, predicting customer churn is crucial for improving customer retention. In literature, the use of single classifiers is predominantly focused. Customer data is complex data due to class imbalance and contain multiple factors that exhibit nonlinear dependencies. In these complex scenarios, single classifiers may be unable to fully utilize the available information to capture the underlying interactions effectively. In contrast, ensemble learning that combines various base classifiers empowers a more thorough data analysis, leading to improved prediction performance. In this paper, a heterogeneous ensemble model is proposed for churn prediction in the telecom industry. The model involves exploratory data analysis, data pre-processing and data resampling to handle class imbalance. In this proposed model, multiple trained base classifiers with different characteristics are integrated through a stacking ensemble technique. Specifically, convolutional-based neural network, logistic regression, decision tree and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are considered as the base classifiers in this work. The proposed stacking ensemble model utilizes the unique strengths of each base classifier and leverages collective knowledge to improve prediction performance with a meta-learner. The efficacy of the proposed model is assessed on a real-world dataset, i.e., Cell2Cell. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model in churn prediction with 62.4% f1-score and 60.62% recall

Negative Correlation Learning for Customer Churn Prediction: A Comparison Study

Recently, telecommunication companies have been paying more attention toward the problem of identification of customer churn behavior. In business, it is well known for service providers that attracting new customers is much more expensive than retaining existing ones. Therefore, adopting accurate models that are able to predict customer churn can effectively help in customer retention campaigns and maximizing the profit. In this paper we will utilize an ensemble of Multilayer perceptrons (MLP) whose training is obtained using negative correlation learning (NCL) for predicting customer churn in a telecommunication company. Experiments results confirm that NCL based MLP ensemble can achieve better generalization performance (high churn rate) compared with ensemble of MLP without NCL (flat ensemble) and other common data mining techniques used for churn analysis

A swarm intelligence-based ensemble learning model for optimizing customer churn prediction in the telecommunications sector

In today's competitive market, predicting clients' behavior is crucial for businesses to meet their needs and prevent them from being attracted by competitors. This is especially important in industries like telecommunications, where the cost of acquiring new customers exceeds retaining existing ones. To achieve this, companies employ Customer Churn Prediction approaches to identify potential customer attrition and develop retention plans. Machine learning models are highly effective in identifying such customers; however, there is a need for more effective techniques to handle class imbalance in churn datasets and enhance prediction accuracy in complex churn prediction datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-level stacking-mode ensemble learning model that utilizes the Whale Optimization Algorithm for feature selection and hyper-parameter optimization. We also introduce a method combining K-member clustering and Whale Optimization to effectively handle class imbalance in churn datasets. Extensive experiments conducted on well-known datasets, along with comparisons to other machine learning models and existing churn prediction methods, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach

B2C E-Commerce Customer Churn Management: Churn Detection using Support Vector Machine and Personalized Retention using Hybrid Recommendations

E-Commerce industry, especially the players in Business-to-Consumer (B2C) sector is witnessing immense competition for survival - by means of trying to penetrate to the customer base of their peers and at the same time not letting their existing customers to churn. Avoiding customer attrition is critical for these firms as the cost of acquiring new customers are going high with more and more players entering into the market with huge capital investments and new penetration strategies. Identifying potential parting away customers and preventing the churn with quick retention actions is the best solution in this scenario. It is also important to understand that what the customer is trying to achieve by opting for a move out so that personalized win back strategies can be applied. E-Commerce industry always possess huge amount of customer data which include information on searches performed, transactions carried out, periodicity of purchases, reviews contributed, feedback shared, etc. for every customers they possess. Data mining and machine learning can help in analyzing this huge volume of data, understanding the customer behavior and detecting possible attrition candidates. This paper proposes a framework based on support vector machine to predict E-Commerce customer churn and a hybrid recommendation strategy to suggest personalized retention actions

Customer Churn Prediction

Churned customers identification plays an essential role for the functioning and growth of any business. Identification of churned customers can help the business to know the reasons for the churn and they can plan their market strategies accordingly to enhance the growth of a business. This research is aimed at developing a machine learning model that can precisely predict the churned customers from the total customers of a Credit Union financial institution. A quantitative and deductive research strategies are employed to build a supervised machine learning model that addresses the class imbalance problem handled feature selection and efficiently predict the customer churn. The overall accuracy of the model, Receiver Operating Characteristic curve and Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve is used as the evaluation metrics for this research to identify the best classifier. A comparative study on the most popular supervised machine learning methods – Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Neural Network were applied to customer churning prediction in a CU context. In the first phase of our experiments, the various feature selection techniques were studied. In the second phase of our study, all models were applied on the imbalance dataset and results were evaluated. SMOTE technique is used to balance the data and then the same models were applied on the balanced dataset and results were evaluated and compared. The best over-all classifier was Random Forest with accuracy almost 97%, precision 91% and recall as 98%

Review of Data Mining Techniques for Churn Prediction in Telecom

Telecommunication sector generates a huge amount of data due to increasing number of subscribers, rapidly renewable technologies; data based applications and other value added service. This data can be usefully mined for churn analysis and prediction. Significant research had been undertaken by researchers worldwide to understand the data mining practices that can be used for predicting customer churn. This paper provides a review of around 100 recent journal articles starting from year 2000 to present the various data mining techniques used in multiple customer based churn models. It then summarizes the existing telecom literature by highlighting the sample size used, churn variables employed and the findings of different DM techniques. Finally, we list the most popular techniques for churn prediction in telecom as decision trees, regression analysis and clustering, thereby providing a roadmap to new researchers to build upon novel churn management models