Churn Prediction Model Improvement Using Automated Machine Learning with Social Network Parameters

Abstract

Due to strong competition in the telecom market, telecom companies are facing customer churn problems. For telecom, it is very important to predict the churn of a user to be able to prevent it. Marketing campaigns can be used to prevent churn and thus prevent a decrease in revenue. Usually, the churn prediction is based on behavioural user data, which describes user activity and general user data. In our prediction model, we added social network attributes that describe the social influence of other users on the user's decision to make a churn. Besides standard centrality measures, we developed two new social attributes, which measure the social influence of already churned users. To determine if social network attributes aid in churn prediction precision we created and compared the models based only on the behavioural data and the models with the social attributes and behavioural data. In our work, we propose upgrading the standard Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) model with the part of the model related to Social Network Analysis (SNA), and we use the proposed model in our research. We show that the AutoML can be used to successfully predict telecom churn based on the real data from telecom operators from Bosnia and Herzegovina.