Churn prediction using customers' implicit behavioral patterns and deep learning

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2297010 (Table of contents)

The processes of market globalization are rapidly changing the competitive conditions of the business and financial sectors. With the emergence of new competitors and increasing investments in the banking services, an environment of closer customer relationships is the demand of today’s economics. In such a scenario, the concept of customer’s willingness to change the service provider – i.e. churn, has become a competitive domain for organizations to work on. In the banking sector, the task to retain the valuable customers has forced management to preemptively work on customers data and devise strategies to engage the customers and thereby reducing the churn rate. Valuable information can be extracted and implicit behavior patterns can be derived from the customers’ transaction and demographic data. Our prediction model, which is jointly using the time and location based sequence features has shown significant improvement in the customer churn prediction. Various supervised models had been developed in the past to predict churning customers; our model is using the features which are derived jointly from location and time stamped data. These sequenced based feature vectors are then used in the neural network for the churn prediction. In this study, we have found that time sequenced data used in a recurrent neural network based Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model can predict with better precision and recall values when compared with baseline model. The feature vector output of our LSTM model combined with other demographic and computed behavioral features of customers gave better prediction results. We have also iv proposed and developed a model to find out whether connection between the customers can assist in the churn prediction using Graph convolutional networks (GCN); which incorporate customer network connections defined over three dimensions