Attribute selection and Customer Churn Prediction in telecom industry

In this competitive world, business is becoming highly saturated. Especially, the field of telecommunication faces complex challenges due to a number of vibrant competitive service providers. Therefore, it has become very difficult for them to retain existing customers. Since the cost of acquiring new customers is much higher than the cost of retaining the existing customers, it is the time for the telecom industries to take necessary steps to retain the customers to stabilize their market value. This paper explores the application of data mining techniques in predicting the likely churners and attribute selection on identifying the churn. It also compares the efficiency of several classifiers and lists their performances for two real telecom datasets.