A Cluster-Based Data Balancing Ensemble Classifier for Response Modeling in Bank Direct Marketing

Abstract

The aim of direct marketing is to find the right customers who are most likely to respond to marketing campaign messages. In order to detect which customers are most valuable, response modeling is used to classify customers as respondent or non-respondent using their purchase history information or other behavioral characteristics. Data mining techniques, including effective classification methods, can be used to predict responsive customers. However, the inherent problem of imbalanced data in response modeling brings some difficulties into response prediction. As a result, the prediction models will be biased towards non-respondent customers. Another problem is that single models cannot provide the desired high accuracy due to their internal limitations. In this paper, we propose an ensemble classification method which removes imbalance in the data, using a combination of clustering and under-sampling. The predictions of multiple classifiers are combined in order to achieve better results. Using data from a bank’s marketing campaigns, this ensemble method is implemented on different classification techniques and the results are evaluated. We also evaluate the performance of this ensemble method against two alternative ensembles. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can improve the performance of the response models for bank direct marketing by raising prediction accuracy and increasing response rate.