Analysis of Customer Churn in Telecommunication Industry with Machine Learning Methods

As the reform development of telecom industry and the entrance of WTO, the competition among the telecom enterprises is becoming tougher. Nowadays, customer-oriented is the new principle of telecom market competition. As the enterprises in telecom industry have much more customers and customer data than those in other industries, the application of customer relationship management (CRM) in telecom industry becomes one of the hottest topics on enterprise informationlization. The thesis discusses the discovery of telecom customer knowledge based on data-mining. In this paper, a customer analysis model is founded by the method of data mining, including customer segmentation analysis, customer churn analysis, customer owing and fraud analysis. In the end, the thesis introduces a real case of a customer segmentation project in a mobile communication company and illustrates the application detail of customer intelligence in this company. In this case, the author uses SPSS Clementine to conduct data-mining. Meanwhile, diverse marketing strategy is also proposed based on the customer segmentation knowledge.

Churn is a customer's behaviour to quit using product or service and then move to another company. Customer churn is serious problem that must be handled to keep company survive. Handling of churn customers starts from predicting which customers will churn. One approach in predicting customer churn is data mining. This study compares two classification methods in data mining namely artificial neural networks and decision trees in banking industry case. The result showed that the artificial neural network has accuracy 86% and precision 71%, which is better than the decision tree. However, the decision tree has a better recall value than the artificial neural network, which is 58%..

A service provider is a business that provides services or the expertise of an individual in a certain sector. A service provider’s customer flow could be very dynamic, with both new and churning customers. For the purpose of minimizing the number of churning customers, the company should perform a customer churn analysis. Customer churn analysis is the process of identifying a pattern or trend in churning customers. In order to classify and predict churning customers, machine learning techniques are required to build the classifier model. This paper will use the Support Vector Machine (SVM), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), and hybrid Adaptive Boosting-SVM (AdaBoost-SVM) model. The hybrid AdaBoost-SVM model is a boosting model which uses SVM as its basis classifier instead of a decision tree. The models will be implemented using airlines and telecommunication customers churn data. The usage of oversampling technique is required to balance the number of observations in both classes of training data. Furthermore, a model comparison will be conducted using the F1-Score and the AUC score as the evaluation metric. The analysis shows that LightGBM performs the best result in both dataset with the highest F1-Score and the shortest computational time. In addition, the boosting model AdaBoost-SVM has a better performance than the SVM model due to the boosting algorithm which always minimizes the model error in each iteration. Despite having a better result, AdaBoost-SVM performs in the longest computational time, making it computationally expensive for large datasets. Additionally, the imbalanced nature of the datasets presents challenges in model performance, requiring the application of oversampling techniques to mitigate bias towards the majority class. In conclusion, LightGBM is the best model to classify churning customers based on the higher F1-Score, AUC score, and the shortest computational time.

Oil well productivity classification and abundance prediction are important for estimating economic benefit of a well. However, it is difficult to predict because well logs are complex and the amount of data collected today has far exceeded our ability to refine and analyze without the use of automated analysis techniques. In response to the problem above mentioned, data mining technology in recent years has shown the ability for discovering information and effectively extracts information from massive observational data sets that can be used to decisions. Especially, classification and prediction methods, are receiving increasing attention from researchers and practitioners in the domain of petroleum exploration and production (E&P) in China. Therefore, data mining is regarded as one of the ten key techniques for challenging problem of oil exploration and development. In this paper, four distinct kinds of classification and prediction methods in data mining, including decision tree (DT), artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM) and Bayesian network are used to two real-world case studies. One is hydrocarbon reservoir productivity classification with 21 samples from 16 wells logging data in Karamay Oilfield 8 th district reservoir. The results show that SVM and Bayesian are superior in the classification accuracy (95.2%) to DT, ANN and SVM, and can be considered as a prominent classification model. Another is reservoir abundance prediction with 17 mature accumulation systems samples in JiYang depression basin. The results show that SVM is superior in the prediction accuracy (91.92%) to DT, ANN and Bayesian, and can be taken as an excellent prediction model.

In the telecommunications sector, customer churn prediction is of critical importance as it directly affects customer loyalty and revenue. Developments in the field of artificial intelligence play an important role in the development of customer churn prediction models. This study presents a comparative evaluation using machine learning (ML) methods for customer churn prediction in the telecommunications sector. The study was conducted on open-source IBM Telco, Orange Telecom and Maven Analytic Telco datasets. 16 different machine learning classification models were evaluated separately on the datasets and the 3 models that gave the best results were selected and their customer churn prediction performances were evaluated with classification metrics. The Linear Discriminant model showed the most successful performance with 80% test accuracy on the IBM Telco dataset, the Gradient Boosting model with 94% test accuracy on Orange Telecom and the Linear Regression model with 99% test accuracy on Maven Analytic Telco.

Artificial intelligence has been applied in wildfire science and management since the 1990s, with early applications including neural networks and expert systems. Since then, the field has rapidly progressed congruently with the wide adoption of machine learning (ML) methods in the environmental sciences. Here, we present a scoping review of ML applications in wildfire science and management. Our overall objective is to improve awareness of ML methods among wildfire researchers and managers, as well as illustrate the diverse and challenging range of problems in wildfire science available to ML data scientists. To that end, we first present an overview of popular ML approaches used in wildfire science to date and then review the use of ML in wildfire science as broadly categorized into six problem domains, including (i) fuels characterization, fire detection, and mapping; (ii) fire weather and climate change; (iii) fire occurrence, susceptibility, and risk; (iv) fire behavior prediction; (v) fire effects; and (vi) fire management. Furthermore, we discuss the advantages and limitations of various ML approaches relating to data size, computational requirements, generalizability, and interpretability, as well as identify opportunities for future advances in the science and management of wildfires within a data science context. In total, to the end of 2019, we identified 300 relevant publications in which the most frequently used ML methods across problem domains included random forests, MaxEnt, artificial neural networks, decision trees, support vector machines, and genetic algorithms. As such, there exists opportunities to apply more current ML methods — including deep learning and agent-based learning — in the wildfire sciences, especially in instances involving very large multivariate datasets. We must recognize, however, that despite the ability of ML models to learn on their own, expertise in wildfire science is necessary to ensure realistic modelling of fire processes across multiple scales, while the complexity of some ML methods such as deep learning requires a dedicated and sophisticated knowledge of their application. Finally, we stress that the wildfire research and management communities play an active role in providing relevant, high-quality, and freely available wildfire data for use by practitioners of ML methods.

Customer churn is a serious problem in the telecommunications industry and occurs more often. The cost of maintaining existing customers is much lower than attracting new customers, and the literature stated that five times the cost of maintaining existing customers have to be spent on attracting new customers. In this article, we have identified customers who intend to stop using the organization's services. One of the most important problems in predicting customer churn is the imbalanced data, which has been tried to be solved and compared with different methods. The machine learning algorithms used in this paper are Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, Multi-Layer Perceptron, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosting. Data was balanced by random over-sampling, random under-sampling and SMOTE methods. The methods of over-sampling and under-sampling had appropriate and almost similar results in terms of the area under the receiver character curve (AUC) index, the method of under-sampling has shown the better specificity, and the method over-sampling has shown the better sensitivity. Also, the performance of random forest and gradient boosting algorithms were better than other algorithms.

Customer churn analysis is getting immense attention from the business community, especially in the telecommunication sector, to help in generating more revenue. This raises the need for modeling a churn prediction system that is not only accurate but also encompasses comprehensibility and justifiability. Also the judgment ability of the domain expert to identify the drivers of churn and determine a correlation between those drivers plays a very important role. For the stakeholder or businessman, it is very important to predict the main drivers of churn to increase the profit. In this paper, we use a technique called Active Learning Based Approach (ALBA), with two rule induction methods, Decision Tree and Ripper to develop a churn prediction model that is not only accurate but also yields comprehensibility and justifiability. ALBA is a rule extraction technique based on a flavor of Support Vector Machine (SVM) called Active Learning. Basically, this approach is used as instance generator. Using this approach, we first remove noise from the data by replacing the SVM predicted labels with the original labels and secondly, we generate artificial instances in the noisy area near support vectors. These newly generated instances are not class-wise balanced. For this purpose, we use SMOTE to make them balanced.

The telecommunication sector becomes popular in recent years and service companies suffer from a loss of valued customers to competitors. In the operational area, customer churn is a challenging issue, which makes companies, loses customers, and therefore is of bigger issue for the industry. Recent technologies and competitors were developing quickly and churn prediction becomes essential for telecom companies. Customer Churn Prediction (CCP) models offer precise detection of significant churners and therefore a retaining solution can be offered to them. Data analytics and machine learning (ML) models can be designed and used for churn investigation to reduce customer churns and improve profit. In this aspect, this article investigates a novel Tomtit Flock Optimization with Deep Variational Autoencoder for Customer Churn Prediction (TFODVAE-CCP) in the telecommunication sector. The presented TFODVAE-CCP technique mainly concentrates on the identification and classification of customer churns. To accomplish this, the presented TFODVAE-CCP technique performs data pre-processing at the primary stage. Next, the TFODVAE-CCP technique employs TFO algorithm to elect an optimal subset of features and thereby improve classification accuracy. Finally, the DVAE method can be leveraged for classifying churner/non-churner. A detailed set of experimental analyses is made on telecommunication churn dataset and the results illustrate the betterment of the TFODVAE-CCP method over other existing models.

Churn rate describes the rate at which customers abandon a product or service. Identifying churn-risk customers is essential for telecom sectors to retain old customers and maintain a higher competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to explore an effective method for detecting the risk of customer churn in telecom sectors through comparing the advanced machine learning methods and their optimization algorithms. Based on two different telecom datasets, Mutual Information classifier was firstly utilized to select the most critical features relevant to customer churn. Next, the controlled-ratio undersampling strategy was employed to balance both minority and majority classes. Key hyperparameter optimization algorithms of Grid Search, Random Search, and Genetic Algorithms were then combined to fit the three promising machine learning models-Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, and K-nearest neighbors into the customer churn prediction problem. Six evaluation metrics-Accuracy, Recall, Precision, AUC, F1-score and Mean Absolute Error, were last used to evaluate the performance of the proposed models. The experimental results have revealed that the RF algorithm optimized by Grid Search based on a low-ratio undersampling strategy (RF-GS-LR) outperformed other models in extracting hidden information and understanding future churning behaviors of customers on both datasets, with the maximum accuracy of 99% and 95% on the applied dataset 1-2 respectively.

With the further reform and market division in the telecommunication industry, there are more and more choices for customers to select telecom products and operators, which lead to the fiercer competition for customers between telecom operators. As the technical method to identify customers churn, the data mining can help the telecom competitors to analyze some seemingly unrelated data into meaningful information. On the basis of the research on the vital problems in the telecom companies, this paper explains how to apply data mining techniques to customer churn analysis, proposes the specific procedures and technology solutions to prevent the customer churn and builds the models of the data mining by analyzing the related algorithm. Finally, based on the systematical analysis on theory and method to data mining, the paper draws the conclusion that the customers churn listing and tree algorithm can solve the practical problems of the customer churn in telecommunication industry.

Customer churn is a critical concern for the telecommunication industry. Understanding and predicting customer churn can lead to more effective retention strategies and an increase in profitability. Predicting customer churn allows telecommunication companies to identify potentially dissatisfied customers early on and take proactive measures to retain them. Due to a large client base, the telecom industry generates a large volume of data on a daily basis. Decision makers and business analysts stressed that acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining existing ones. Business analysts and customer relationship management (CRM) analysts must understand the reasons for customer churn as well as behaviour patterns from existing churn data. This paper proposes a churn prediction model that uses classication and clustering techniques to identify churn customers and provides the factors that contribute to customer churning in the telecom sector. The results presented shows that XBoost and Random Forest achieved higher prediction accuracy when compared to K- Nearest Neighbours, Support Vector Machines and Decision Trees in terms of accuracy, precision, F1-Score and recall.

Modeling of hydrogen separation through Pd membrane with vacuum pressure using Taguchi and machine learning methods

PurposeInjuries are common in sports and can have significant physical, psychological and financial consequences. Machine learning (ML) methods could be used to improve injury prediction and allow proper approaches to injury prevention. The aim of our study was therefore to perform a systematic review of ML methods in sport injury prediction and prevention.MethodsA search of the PubMed database was performed on March 24th 2020. Eligible articles included original studies investigating the role of ML for sport injury prediction and prevention. Two independent reviewers screened articles, assessed eligibility, risk of bias and extracted data. Methodological quality and risk of bias were determined by the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale. Study quality was evaluated using the GRADE working group methodology.ResultsEleven out of 249 studies met inclusion/exclusion criteria. Different ML methods were used (tree-based ensemble methods (n = 9), Support Vector Machines (n = 4), Artificial Neural Networks (n = 2)). The classification methods were facilitated by preprocessing steps (n = 5) and optimized using over- and undersampling methods (n = 6), hyperparameter tuning (n = 4), feature selection (n = 3) and dimensionality reduction (n = 1). Injury predictive performance ranged from poor (Accuracy = 52%, AUC = 0.52) to strong (AUC = 0.87, f1-score = 85%). ConclusionsCurrent ML methods can be used to identify athletes at high injury risk and be helpful to detect the most important injury risk factors. Methodological quality of the analyses was sufficient in general, but could be further improved. More effort should be put in the interpretation of the ML models.

Deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) methods have recently contributed to the advancement of models in the various aspects of prediction, planning, and uncertainty analysis of smart cities and urban development. This paper presents the state of the art of DL and ML methods used in this realm. Through a novel taxonomy, the advances in model development and new application domains in urban sustainability and smart cities are presented. Findings reveal that five DL and ML methods have been most applied to address the different aspects of smart cities. These are artificial neural networks; support vector machines; decision trees; ensembles, Bayesians, hybrids, and neuro-fuzzy; and deep learning. It is also disclosed that energy, health, and urban transport are the main domains of smart cities that DL and ML methods contributed in to address their problems.