Business analytics in telemarketing: Cost-sensitive analysis of bank campaigns using artificial neural networks

Abstract

The banking industry has been seeking novel ways to leverage database marketing efficiency. However, the nature of bank marketing data hindered the researchers in the process of finding a reliable analytical scheme. Various studies have attempted to improve the performance of Artificial Neural Networks in predicting clients' intentions but did not resolve the issue of imbalanced data. This research aims at improving the performance of predicting the willingness of bank clients to apply for a term deposit in highly imbalanced datasets. It proposes enhanced Artificial Neural Network models (i.e., cost-sensitive) to mitigate the dramatic effects of highly imbalanced data, without distorting the original data samples. The generated models are evaluated, validated, and consequently compared to different machine-learning models. A real-world telemarketing dataset from a Portuguese bank is used in all the experiments. The best prediction model achieved 79% of geometric mean, and misclassification errors were minimized to 0.192, 0.229 of Type I & Type II Errors, respectively. In summary, an interesting Meta-Cost method improved the performance of the prediction model without imposing significant processing overhead or altering original data samples.