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Reseach Article

Handling Class Imbalance in Mobile Telecoms Customer Churn Prediction

by Clement Kirui, Li Hong, Edgar Kirui
International Journal of Computer Applications
Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA
Volume 72 - Number 23
Year of Publication: 2013
Authors: Clement Kirui, Li Hong, Edgar Kirui
10.5120/12680-9446

Clement Kirui, Li Hong, Edgar Kirui . Handling Class Imbalance in Mobile Telecoms Customer Churn Prediction. International Journal of Computer Applications. 72, 23 ( June 2013), 7-13. DOI=10.5120/12680-9446

@article{ 10.5120/12680-9446,
author = { Clement Kirui, Li Hong, Edgar Kirui },
title = { Handling Class Imbalance in Mobile Telecoms Customer Churn Prediction },
journal = { International Journal of Computer Applications },
issue_date = { June 2013 },
volume = { 72 },
number = { 23 },
month = { June },
year = { 2013 },
issn = { 0975-8887 },
pages = { 7-13 },
numpages = {9},
url = { https://ijcaonline.org/archives/volume72/number23/12680-9446/ },
doi = { 10.5120/12680-9446 },
publisher = {Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA},
address = {New York, USA}
}
%0 Journal Article
%1 2024-02-06T21:38:41.274347+05:30
%A Clement Kirui
%A Li Hong
%A Edgar Kirui
%T Handling Class Imbalance in Mobile Telecoms Customer Churn Prediction
%J International Journal of Computer Applications
%@ 0975-8887
%V 72
%N 23
%P 7-13
%D 2013
%I Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA
Abstract

Class imbalance is a major problem that is often experienced when dealing with rare events, such as churn recognition in the mobile telecommunications industry. In this work, various strategies of addressing the problem are studied and a demonstration of how under-sampling and Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) can be used to address the problem is given. The two techniques are implemented individually first, and then we take the hybrid approach by combining both SMOTE and undersampling. For performance evaluation, two predictive techniques, C4. 5 decision tree and Naïve Bayes classifier with 10-fold cross validation are used. TPR and FPR values are obtained and used to generate ROC curves from which AUC values are calculated and performance comparison of the three techniques is performed. Results show that the hybrid approach achieves better performance.

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Index Terms

Computer Science
Information Sciences

Keywords

Class Imbalance Customer Churn Over-sampling Under-sampling Prediction