Introducing A Hybrid Data Mining Model to Evaluate Customer Loyalty

Abstract

The main aim of this study was introducing a comprehensive model of bank customers᾽ loyalty evaluation based on the assessment and comparison of different clustering methods᾽ performance. This study also pursues the following specific objectives: a) using different clustering methods and comparing them for customer classification, b) finding the effective variables in determining the customer loyalty, and c) using different collective classification methods to increase the modeling accuracy and comparing the results with the basic methods. Since loyal customers generate more profit, this study aims at introducing a two-step model for classification of customers and their loyalty. For this purpose, various methods of clustering such as K-medoids, X-means and K-means were used, the last of which outperformed the other two through comparing with Davis-Bouldin index. Customers were clustered by using K-means and members of these four clusters were analyzed and labeled. Then, a predictive model was run based on demographic variables of customers using various classification methods such as DT (Decision Tree), ANN (Artificial Neural Networks), NB (Naive Bayes), KNN (K-Nearest Neighbors) and SVM (Support Vector Machine), as well as their bagging and boosting to predict the class of loyal customers. The results showed that the bagging-ANN was the most accurate method in predicting loyal customers. This two-stage model can be used in banks and financial institutions with similar data to identify the type of future customers.