Customer Churn Prediction Using Big Data Analytics
2016 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 20 credits / 30 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
Customer churn is always a grievous issue for the Telecom industry as customers do not hesitate to leave if they don’t find what they are looking for. They certainly want competitive pricing, value for money and above all, high quality service. Customer churning is directly related to customer satisfaction. It’s a known fact that the cost of customer acquisition is far greater than cost of customer retention, that makes retention a crucial business prototype. There is no standard model which addresses the churning issues of global telecom service providers accurately. BigData analytics with Machine Learning were found to be an efficient way for identifying churn. This thesis aims to predict customer churn using Big Data analytics, namely a J48 decision tree on a Java based benchmark tool, WEKA. Three different datasets from various sources were considered; first includes Telecom operator’s six month aggregate active and churned users’ data usage volumes, second includes globally surveyed data and third dataset comprises of individual weekly data usage analysis of 22 android customers along with their average quality, annoyance and churn scores by accompanying theses. Statistical analyses and J48 Decision trees were drawn for three different datasets. From the statistics of normalized volumes, autocorrelations were small owing to reliable confidence intervals, but confidence intervals were overlapping and close by, therefore no much significance could be noticed, henceforth no strong trends could be observed. From decision tree analytics, decision trees with 52%, 70% and 95% accuracies were achieved for three different data sources respectively.
Data preprocessing, data normalization and feature selection have shown to be prominently influential. Monthly data volumes have not shown much decision power. Average Quality, Churn Risk and to some extent, Annoyance scores may point out a probable churner. Weekly data volumes with customer’s recent history and necessary attributes like age, gender, tenure, bill, contract, data plan, etc., are pivotal for churn prediction.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2016. , p. 41
Keywords [en]
Big Data, churn prediction, decision tree, Quality of Experience
National Category
Telecommunications
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:bth-13518OAI: oai:DiVA.org:bth-13518DiVA, id: diva2:1049992
Subject / course
ET2580 Master's Thesis (120 credits) in Electrical Engineering with emphasis on Telecommunication Systems
Educational program
ETATX Master of Science Programme in Electrical Engineering with emphasis on Telecommunication Systems
Presentation
2016-09-26, J3208 Claude Shannon, Valhallavägen, 371 41, Karlskrona, Sweden, 12:30 (English)
Supervisors
Examiners
2016-11-282016-11-282016-11-28Bibliographically approved