Customer Churn Prediction by Classification Models in Machine Learning

Abstract

The classification model in machine learning has been employed to address different problems. Machine Learning classification is an effective method to realize customer churn prediction. This article provides a comparative study of machine learning from the perspective of predicting customer churn. Customer churn is one of the obstacles hindering the development of companies. Through classification approaches based on machine learning, customer churn can be predicted precisely, thus providing decision-making capabilities to these companies. Customer churn prediction is a typical classification problem and can be addressed by the use of a decision tree or random forest model. In this paper, decision tree and random forest models are employed to predict customer churn, using sales data provided by a chemical company from 2012 to 2020. We analyze the underlying risk of customer churn and the customer churn factors, including the low-priced count (LC), total amount of money (TM), and creation time (CT). The prediction results of the two models are evaluated by calculating various metrics. The experimental results indicate that the low-priced count (LC) is the most essential factor for customer churn. The results of the comparison, considering the training error and generalization error including: confusion matrix, ROC curve, AUC, precision, recall, and F1 score, reveal that the random forest model has better prediction accuracy than the decision tree model.