Research trends in customer churn prediction: A data mining approach

This study aims to present a very recent literature review on customer churn prediction based on 40 relevant articles published between 2010 and June 2020. For searching the literature, the 40 most relevant articles according to Google Scholar ranking were selected and collected. Then, each of the articles were scrutinized according to six main dimensions: Reference; Areas of Research; Main Goal; Dataset; Techniques; outcomes. The research has proven that the most widely used data mining techniques are decision tree (DT), support vector machines (SVM) and Logistic Regression (LR). The process combined with the massive data accumulation in the telecom industry and the increasingly mature data mining technology motivates the development and application of customer churn model to predict the customer behavior. Therefore, the telecom company can effectively predict the churn of customers, and then avoid customer churn by taking measures such as reducing monthly fixed fees. The present literature review offers recent insights on customer churn prediction scientific literature, revealing research gaps, providing evidences on current trends and helping to understand how to develop accurate and efficient Marketing strategies. The most important finding is that artificial intelligence techniques are are obviously becoming more used in recent years for telecom customer churn prediction. Especially, artificial NN are outstandingly recognized as a competent prediction method. This is a relevant topic for journals related to other social sciences, such as Banking, and also telecom data make up an outstanding source for developing novel prediction modeling techniques. Thus, this study can lead to recommendations for future customer churn prediction improvement, in addition to providing an overview of current research trends.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Customer churn prediction in telecom using machine learning and social network analysis in big data platform

Customer churn is a major problem and one of the most important concerns for large companies. Due to the direct effect on the revenues of the companies, especially in the telecom field, companies are seeking to develop means to predict potential customer to churn. Therefore, finding factors that increase customer churn is important to take necessary actions to reduce this churn. The main contribution of our work is to develop a churn prediction model which assists telecom operators to predict customers who are most likely subject to churn. The model developed in this work uses machine learning techniques on big data platform and builds a new way of features' engineering and selection. In order to measure the performance of the model, the Area Under Curve (AUC) standard measure is adopted, and the AUC value obtained is 93.3%. Another main contribution is to use customer social network in the prediction model by extracting Social Network Analysis (SNA) features. The use of SNA enhanced the performance of the model from 84 to 93.3% against AUC standard. The model was prepared and tested through Spark environment by working on a large dataset created by transforming big raw data provided by SyriaTel telecom company. The dataset contained all customers' information over 9 months, and was used to train, test, and evaluate the system at SyriaTel. The model experimented four algorithms: Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosted Machine Tree "GBM" and Extreme Gradient Boosting "XGBOOST". However, the best results were obtained by applying XGBOOST algorithm. This algorithm was used for classification in this churn predictive model.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures. PDF https://rdcu.be/budK

Customer Churn Prediction of Telecom Company Using Machine Learning Algorithms

We can’t escape the fact that using telecommunications has become a significant part of our everyday lives. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the telecommunication industry has become crucial.  Hence, the industry now enjoys growth opportunities. In this study, KNN, Random Forest (RF), AdaBoost, Logistic Regression (LR), XGBoost, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are 6 supervised machine learning algorithms that will be used in this study to predict the customer churn of a telecom company in California. The goal of this study is to identify the classifier that predicts customer churn the most effectively. As evidenced by its accuracy of 79.67%, precision of 64.67%, recall of 51.87%, and F1-score of 57.57%, XGBoost is the overall most effective classifier in this study. Next, the purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics of customers who are most likely to leave the telecom company. These characteristics were discovered based on customers’ demographics and account information. Lastly, this study also provides the company with advice on how to retain customers. The study advises company to personalize the customer experience, implement a customer loyalty program, and apply AI in customer relationship management in retaining customers

Bagging and boosting classification trees to predict churn.

In this paper, bagging and boosting techniques are proposed as performing tools for churn prediction. These methods consist of sequentially applying a classification algorithm to resampled or reweigthed versions of the data set. We apply these algorithms on a customer database of an anonymous U.S. wireless telecom company. Bagging is easy to put in practice and, as well as boosting, leads to a significant increase of the classification performance when applied to the customer database. Furthermore, we compare bagged and boosted classifiers computed, respectively, from a balanced versus a proportional sample to predict a rare event (here, churn), and propose a simple correction method for classifiers constructed from balanced training samples.Algorithms; Bagging; Boosting; Churn; Classification; Classifiers; Companies; Data; Gini coefficient; Methods; Performance; Rare events; Sampling; Top decile; Training;

Twitter Analysis to Predict the Satisfaction of Saudi Telecommunication Companies’ Customers

The flexibility in mobile communications allows customers to quickly switch from one service provider to another, making customer churn one of the most critical challenges for the data and voice telecommunication service industry. In 2019, the percentage of post-paid telecommunication customers in Saudi Arabia decreased; this represents a great deal of customer dissatisfaction and subsequent corporate fiscal losses. Many studies correlate customer satisfaction with customer churn. The Telecom companies have depended on historical customer data to measure customer churn. However, historical data does not reveal current customer satisfaction or future likeliness to switch between telecom companies. Current methods of analysing churn rates are inadequate and faced some issues, particularly in the Saudi market. This research was conducted to realize the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer churn and how to use social media mining to measure customer satisfaction and predict customer churn. This research conducted a systematic review to address the churn prediction models problems and their relation to Arabic Sentiment Analysis. The findings show that the current churn models lack integrating structural data frameworks with real-time analytics to target customers in real-time. In addition, the findings show that the specific issues in the existing churn prediction models in Saudi Arabia relate to the Arabic language itself, its complexity, and lack of resources. As a result, I have constructed the first gold standard corpus of Saudi tweets related to telecom companies, comprising 20,000 manually annotated tweets. It has been generated as a dialect sentiment lexicon extracted from a larger Twitter dataset collected by me to capture text characteristics in social media. I developed a new ASA prediction model for telecommunication that fills the detected gaps in the ASA literature and fits the telecommunication field. The proposed model proved its effectiveness for Arabic sentiment analysis and churn prediction. This is the first work using Twitter mining to predict potential customer loss (churn) in Saudi telecom companies, which has not been attempted before. Different fields, such as education, have different features, making applying the proposed model is interesting because it based on text-mining