Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Customer Churn Prediction Analysis

Abstract

Several machine learning models have been proposed to address customer churn problems. In this work, the authors used a novel method by applying deep convolutional neural networks on a labeled dataset of 18,000 prepaid subscribers to classify/identify customer churn. The learning technique was based on call detail records (CDR) describing customers activity during two-month traffic from a real telecommunication provider. The authors use this method to identify new business use case by considering each subscriber as a single input image describing the churning state. Different experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of the method. The authors found that deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) outperformed other traditional machine learning algorithms (support vector machines, random forest, and gradient boosting classifier) with F1 score of 91%. Thus, the use of this approach can reduce the cost related to customer loss and fits better the churn prediction business use case.