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Churn Prediction in the Mobile Telecommunications Industry An application of Survival Analysis in Data Mining Master Thesis
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Alberts, Luc |
| Copyright Year | 2006 |
| Abstract | research at the mobile telecommunication company Vodafone Netherlands at Maastricht. The main aim of this research was to gain more insight into survival analysis and its application as a predictive model. I considered translating theoretical knowledge to a real life context both challenging as well as very appealing. First, I would like to thank my supervisor dr. Ronald Westra and Carel Meijer of Vodafone for their guidance during my research and for giving me the opportunity to carry out this assignment. I would also like to thank professor Roel Braekers of Hasselt University for answering my questions about survival analysis. Further, I would like to thank Driek Maas and everyone at Information Management. Last but not least I would like thank my family and my girlfriend for their support, interest and understanding during this period. Abstract Recently, the mobile telecommunication market in the Netherlands has changed from a rapidly growing market, into a state of saturation and fierce competition. The focus of telecommunication companies has therefore shifted from building a large customer base into keeping customers 'in house'. Customers who switch to a competitor are so called churned customers. Churn prevention , through churn prediction, is one way to keep customers 'in house'. In this study we focus solely on prepaid customers. In contrast to post-paid customers, prepaid customers are not bound by a contract. The central problem concerning prepaid customers is that the actual churn date in most cases is difficult to assess. This is a direct consequence of the difficulty in providing a unequivocal definition of churning and a lack of understanding in churn behavior. To overcome this problem, here a custom and flexible churn definition is proposed. The predictive churn model presented in this study is based on the theory of survival analysis. Survival analysis is predominantly used in medical sciences to examine the influence of variables on the length of survival of patients. In survival analysis, the time until the occurance of a well-defined event is modelled. In the present case, the event of interest is churn. In this research the focus is on the extended Cox model. This is a variant of the original proportional hazards model, that is used for churn modelling. Since survival models are not designed to act as predictive models, some adjustments had to be made. To be able to compare the performance of the extended Cox model with the established … |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://dke.maastrichtuniversity.nl/westra/PhDMaBa-teaching/GraduationStudents/LaurensAlberts2006/Thesis_Laurens_Alberts.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
