Direct marketing modeling with CART and CHAID

Abstract

In a recent article in the Journal of Direct Marketing, R. Thrasher gave an introduction to the Classification and Regression Trees (CART) methodology from the point of view of direct marketing. Following up on this work, with the help of a case study, this article investigates further technical aspects of response modeling with CART and Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) of practical relevance to direct marketing professionals and researchers and compares the performance of CART and CHAID models built on the same analysis file, finding that the response lifts are very close for both types of models. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.