Analysing customer churn in insurance data - A case study

Abstract

Designing a new application of knowledge discovery is a very tedious task. The success is determined to a great extent by an adequate example representation. The transformation of given data to the example representation is a matter of feature generation and selection. The search for an appropriate approach is difficult. In particular, if time data are involved, there exist a large variety of how to handle them. Reports on successful cases can provide case designers with a guideline for the design of new, similar cases. In this paper we present a complete knowledge discovery process applied to insurance data. We use the TF/IDF representation from information retrieval for compiling time-related features of the data set. Experimental reasults show that these new features lead to superior results in terms of accuracy, precision and recall. A heuristic is given which calculates how much the feature space is enlarged or shrinked by the transformation to TF/IDF. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.