Comparative study of dimension reduction methods for highly imbalanced overlapping churn data

Abstract

Retention of possible churning customer is one of the most important issues in customer relationship management, so companies try to predict churn customers using their large-scale high-dimensional data. This study focuses on dealing with large data sets by reducing the dimensionality. By using six different dimension reduction methods-Principal Component Analysis (PCA), factor analysis (FA), locally linear embedding (LLE), local tangent space alignment (LTSA), locally preserving projections (LPP), and deep auto-encoder-our experiments apply each dimension reduction method to the training data, build a classification model using the mapped data and then measure the performance using hit rate to compare the dimension reduction methods. In the result, PCA shows good performance despite its simplicity, and the deep auto-encoder gives the best overall performance. These results can be explained by the characteristics of the churn prediction data that is highly correlated and overlapped over the classes. We also proposed a simple out-of-sample extension method for the nonlinear dimension reduction methods, LLE and LTSA, utilizing the characteristic of the data.