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Improved Marketing Decision Making in a Customer Churn Prediction Context Using Generalized Additive Models

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  • K. COUSSEMENT
  • D. F. BENOIT
  • D. VAN DEN POEL

Abstract

Nowadays, companies are investing in a well-considered CRM strategy. One of the cornerstones in CRM is customer churn prediction, where one tries to predict whether or not a customer will leave the company. This study focuses on how to better support marketing decision makers in identifying risky customers by using Generalized Additive Models (GAM). Compared to Logistic Regression, GAM relaxes the linearity constraint which allows for complex non-linear fits to the data. The contributions to the literature are three-fold: (i) it is shown that GAM is able to improve marketing decision making by better identifying risky customers; (ii) it is shown that GAM increases the interpretability of the churn model by visualizing the non-linear relationships with customer churn identifying a quasi-exponential, a U, an inverted U or a complex trend and (iii) marketing managers are able to significantly increase business value by applying GAM in this churn prediction context.

Suggested Citation

  • K. Coussement & D. F. Benoit & D. Van Den Poel, 2009. "Improved Marketing Decision Making in a Customer Churn Prediction Context Using Generalized Additive Models," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 09/603, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    • Handle: RePEc:rug:rugwps:09/603
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    7. K. Coussement & D. Van Den Poel, 2008. "Improving Customer Attrition Prediction by Integrating Emotions from Client/Company Interaction Emails and Evaluating Multiple Classifiers," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 08/527, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    8. J. Burez & D. Van Den Poel, 2008. "Handling class imbalance in customer churn prediction," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 08/517, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
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    Cited by:

    1. K. W. De Bock & D. Van Den Poel, 2012. "Reconciling Performance and Interpretability in Customer Churn Prediction using Ensemble Learning based on Generalized Additive Models," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 12/805, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    2. M. Ballings & D. Van Den Poel & E. Verhagen, 2013. "Evaluating the Added Value of Pictorial Data for Customer Churn Prediction," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 13/869, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    3. Matthias Bogaert & Michel Ballings & Martijn Hosten & Dirk Van den Poel, 2017. "Identifying Soccer Players on Facebook Through Predictive Analytics," Decision Analysis, INFORMS, vol. 14(4), pages 274-297, December.
    4. P. Baecke & D. Van Den Poel, 2012. "Including Spatial Interdependence in Customer Acquisition Models: a Cross-Category Comparison," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 12/788, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    5. D. F. Benoit & D. Van Den Poel, 2012. "Improving Customer Retention In Financial Services Using Kinship Network Information," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 12/786, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    6. Koen W. de Bock & Arno de Caigny, 2021. "Spline-rule ensemble classifiers with structured sparsity regularization for interpretable customer churn modeling," Post-Print hal-03391564, HAL.
    7. Louis Geiler & Séverine Affeldt & Mohamed Nadif, 2022. "A survey on machine learning methods for churn prediction," Post-Print hal-03824873, HAL.
    8. Ballings, Michel & Van den Poel, Dirk, 2015. "CRM in social media: Predicting increases in Facebook usage frequency," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 244(1), pages 248-260.
    9. Gaurav Gupta & Himanshu Aggarwal, 2016. "Analysing customer responses to migrate strategies in making retailing and CRM effective," International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 12(1), pages 92-127.
    10. Kraus, Mathias & Tschernutter, Daniel & Weinzierl, Sven & Zschech, Patrick, 2024. "Interpretable generalized additive neural networks," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 317(2), pages 303-316.
    11. K. W. De Bock & D. Van Den Poel, 2011. "An empirical evaluation of rotation-based ensemble classifiers for customer churn prediction," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 11/717, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    12. M. Ballings & D. Van Den Poel, 2012. "The Relevant Length of Customer Event History for Churn Prediction: How long is long enough?," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 12/804, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    13. Coussement, Kristof & De Bock, Koen W., 2013. "Customer churn prediction in the online gambling industry: The beneficial effect of ensemble learning," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 66(9), pages 1629-1636.
    14. Seungwook Kim & Daeyoung Choi & Eunjung Lee & Wonjong Rhee, 2017. "Churn prediction of mobile and online casual games using play log data," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(7), pages 1-19, July.
    15. Schaeffer, Satu Elisa & Rodriguez Sanchez, Sara Veronica, 2020. "Forecasting client retention — A machine-learning approach," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).

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