Churn Analysis in a Romanian Telecommunications Company

Authors

  • Andreea Dumitrache PhD Student, Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania
  • Monica Mihaela Maer Matei Conf. Univ. Dr., Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18662/po/93

Keywords:

Churn, class imbalance, customer, telecommunications

Abstract

Telecommunications is one of the sectors where the customer base plays a significant role in maintaining stable revenues, so special attention is paid to prevent their migration to other providers. Over time, businesses in the telecommunications industry have faced multiple threats of financial loss from migrating customers who want to leave their telecom service provider in exchange for other offers from competing companies. An effective prediction model of this action can not only be viewed as an insurance policy, supporting stable revenue, but also provides suggestions for database management so that potential migrant customers can benefit from personalized offers and services, depending on their profile, thus preventing their loss. The aim of this paper is to predict customers who are going to defect in a Romanian mobile telecommunications company. The churn analysis is developed for post-paid customers. We used logistic regression to predict churn and a solution based on smoothed bootstrap technique to correct for the drawbacks of imbalanced classes. In our study this procedure did not significantly improve the performance of the logistic classifier measured by AUC (Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve). So even after balancing the sample we still obtain a really reduced value of the AUC, making it difficult to correctly predict churn phenomenon on the available data set.

Author Biographies

Andreea Dumitrache, PhD Student, Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania

PhD Student, Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania

Monica Mihaela Maer Matei, Conf. Univ. Dr., Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania

Conf. Univ. Dr., Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania

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Published

2019-12-19

How to Cite

Dumitrache, A., & Maer Matei, M. M. (2019). Churn Analysis in a Romanian Telecommunications Company. Postmodern Openings, 10(4), 44-53. https://doi.org/10.18662/po/93

Issue

Section

Research Articles

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