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Article
Customer churn prediction in telecommunication industry using data certainty
Journal of Business Research
  • Adnan Amin, Institute of Management Sciences
  • Feras Al-Obeidat, Zayed University
  • Babar Shah, Zayed University
  • Awais Adnan, Institute of Management Sciences
  • Jonathan Loo, University of West London
  • Sajid Anwar, Institute of Management Sciences
ORCID Identifiers

0000-0002-0852-8833

Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2019
Abstract

© 2018 Elsevier Inc. Customer Churn Prediction (CCP) is a challenging activity for decision makers and machine learning community because most of the time, churn and non-churn customers have resembling features. From different experiments on customer churn and related data, it can be seen that a classifier shows different accuracy levels for different zones of a dataset. In such situations, a correlation can easily be observed in the level of classifier's accuracy and certainty of its prediction. If a mechanism can be defined to estimate the classifier's certainty for different zones within the data, then the expected classifier's accuracy can be estimated even before the classification. In this paper, a novel CCP approach is presented based on the above concept of classifier's certainty estimation using distance factor. The dataset is grouped into different zones based on the distance factor which are then divided into two categories as; (i) data with high certainty, and (ii) data with low certainty, for predicting customers exhibiting Churn and Non-churn behavior. Using different state-of-the-art evaluation measures (e.g., accuracy, f-measure, precision and recall) on different publicly available the Telecommunication Industry (TCI) datasets show that (i) the distance factor is strongly co-related with the certainty of the classifier, and (ii) the classifier obtained high accuracy in the zone with greater distance factor's value (i.e., customer churn and non-churn with high certainty) than those placed in the zone with smaller distance factor's value (i.e., customer churn and non-churn with low certainty).

Publisher
Elsevier Inc.
Disciplines
Keywords
  • Churn prediction,
  • Classification,
  • Customer churn,
  • Telecommunication,
  • Uncertain samples
Scopus ID
85044089289
Indexed in Scopus
Yes
Open Access
Yes
Open Access Type
Green: A manuscript of this publication is openly available in a repository
https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/4800/1/Customer%20churn%20prediction.pdf
Citation Information
Adnan Amin, Feras Al-Obeidat, Babar Shah, Awais Adnan, et al.. "Customer churn prediction in telecommunication industry using data certainty" Journal of Business Research Vol. 94 (2019) p. 290 - 301 ISSN: <a href="https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/issn/0148-2963" target="_blank">0148-2963</a>
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/babar-shah/28/