No Future Without the Past? Predicting Churn in the Face of Customer Privacy

For customer-centric firms, churn prediction plays a central role in churn management programs. Methodological advances have emphasized the use of customer panel data to model the dynamic evolution of a customer base to improve churn predictions. However, pressure from policy makers and the public geared to reducing the storage of customer data has led to firms' self-policing' by limiting data storage, rendering panel data methods infeasible. We remedy these problems by developing a method that captures the dynamic evolution of a customer base without relying on the availability past data. Instead, using a recursively updated model our approach requires only knowledge of past model parameters. This generalized mixture of Kalman filters model maintains the accuracy of churn predictions compared to existing panel data methods when data from the past is available. In the absence of past data, applications in the insurance and telecommunications industry establish superior predictive performance compared to simpler benchmarks. These improvements arise because the proposed method captures the same dynamics and unobserved heterogeneity present in customer databases as advanced methods, while achieving privacy preserving data minimization and data anonymization. We therefore conclude that privacy preservation does not have to come at the cost of analytical operations. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.</p

From Manuscript Evaluation to Article Valuation: The Changing Technologies of Journal Peer Review

International audienceBorn in the seventeenth century, journal peer review is an extremely diverse technology, constantly torn between two often incompatible goals: the validation of manuscripts conceived as a collective industrial-like reproducible process performed to assert scientific statements, and the dissemination of articles considered as a means to spur scientific discussion, raising controversies and civically challenging a state of knowledge. Such a situation is particularly conducive to clarifying the processes of valuation and evaluation in journal peer review. In this article, such processes are considered as specific tests in order to emphasize the uncertain properties of pre-tests manuscripts. On the one hand, evaluation tests are examined at the core of the validation of manuscripts, such as defining the coordination of judging instances (editor-in-chief, editorial committee, outside reviewers) or controlling the modalities of inter-knowledge between reviewers and authors. They are also studied regarding the dissemination of articles, notably through the contemporary conception of a continuing evaluation test termed " post publication peer review ". On the other hand, valuation tests are both part of the validation of manuscripts, such as the weighting of different judgments of the same manuscript and the tensions that these hierarchies cause, and of the dissemination of articles, such as attention metrics recording the uses of articles. The conclusion sketches out how the articulation of these different tests has recently empowered readers as a new key judging instance for dissemination and for validation, potentially transforming the definition of peers, and thus the whole process of journal peer review