Forecasting credit card attrition using machine learning models

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo el estudio, aplicación e implementación de modelos Machine Learning para identificar qué clientes desean cancelar alguna de sus tarjetas de crédito. La industria bancaria utiliza esta tecnología con el fin de obtener predicciones más fiables a la hora de identificar oportunidades de compra, inversión o fraude. Estos modelos se pueden adaptar de forma independiente, por medio del reconocimiento de patrones y algoritmos basados en cálculos matemáticos. Para desarrollar la investigación se implementaron y evaluaron cuatro modelos (LightGBM, XGBoost, Random Forest y Logistic Regression) con el fin de predecir a través de los datos del cliente y sus productos la posibilidad de que cancele sus tarjetas de crédito. Mediante una análisis de la curvas ROC usando las métricas AUC, se llegó a la conclusión que de los modelos seleccionados, el modelo elegido para realizar la predicción fue LightGBM, ya que fue el que tuvo mejor desempeño en los experimentos realizados. De igual forma, se encontró que la variable Score Acierta, una calificación del cliente proveída por la central de riesgos, es la que más discrimina en los modelos predicción.The objective of this work is the implementation and evaluation of Machine Learning models to identify which customers want to cancel their credit cards. The banking industry uses this technology to obtain more reliable predictions when identifying opportunities for purchase, investment, or fraud. These models can be adapted independently, by recognizing patterns and algorithms based on mathematical calculations. Four models (LightGBM, XGBoost, Random Forest and Logistic Regression) were implemented and evaluated to predict, using data about customers and products held pertaining to a bank in Colombia, the likelihood of customers cancelling their credit cards. By analysing the ROC curves using the AUC metric, it is concluded that, of the selected models, the model chosen for deployment would be LightGBM, since it was the one that performed best in the experiments conducted. Furthermore, the ``Score Acierta'' variable, a customer rating provided by the Colombian credit rating agency, was found to be the most discriminating in prediction models

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

Explaining Deep Learning Models for Tabular Data Using Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation

Trust and credibility in machine learning models are bolstered by the ability of a model to explain its decisions. While explainability of deep learning models is a well-known challenge, a further challenge is clarity of the explanation itself for relevant stakeholders of the model. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), an established explainability technique developed for deep models in computer vision, provides intuitive human-readable heat maps of input images. We present the novel application of LRP with tabular datasets containing mixed data (categorical and numerical) using a deep neural network (1D-CNN), for Credit Card Fraud detection and Telecom Customer Churn prediction use cases. We show how LRP is more effective than traditional explainability concepts of Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) for explainability. This effectiveness is both local to a sample level and holistic over the whole testing set. We also discuss the significant computational time advantage of LRP (1–2 s) over LIME (22 s) and SHAP (108 s) on the same laptop, and thus its potential for real time application scenarios. In addition, our validation of LRP has highlighted features for enhancing model performance, thus opening up a new area of research of using XAI as an approach for feature subset selection

Consumer finance: challenges for operational research

Consumer finance has become one of the most important areas of banking, both because of the amount of money being lent and the impact of such credit on global economy and the realisation that the credit crunch of 2008 was partly due to incorrect modelling of the risks in such lending. This paper reviews the development of credit scoring—the way of assessing risk in consumer finance—and what is meant by a credit score. It then outlines 10 challenges for Operational Research to support modelling in consumer finance. Some of these involve developing more robust risk assessment systems, whereas others are to expand the use of such modelling to deal with the current objectives of lenders and the new decisions they have to make in consumer finance. <br/

Operations research in consumer finance: challenges for operational research

Consumer finance has become one of the most important areas of banking both because of the amount of money being lent and the impact of such credit on the global economy and the realisation that the credit crunch of 2008 was partly due to incorrect modelling of the risks in such lending. This paper reviews the development of credit scoring,-the way of assessing risk in consumer finance- and what is meant by a credit score. It then outlines ten challenges for Operational Research to support modelling in consumer finance. Some of these are to developing more robust risk assessment systems while others are to expand the use of such modelling to deal with the current objectives of lenders and the new decisions they have to make in consumer financ