Constructing response model using ensemble based on feature subset selection

Abstract

In building a response model, determining the inputs to the model has been an important issue because of the complexities of the marketing problem and limitations of mental models for decision-making. It is common that the customers' historical purchase data contains many irrelevant or redundant features thus result in bad model performance. Furthermore, single complex models based on feature subset selection may not always report improved performance largely because of overfitting and instability. Ensemble is a widely adopted mechanism for alleviating such problems. In this paper, we propose an ensemble creation method based on GA based wrapper feature subset selection mechanism. Through experimental studies on DMEF4 data set, we found that the proposed method has, at least, two distinct advantages over other models: first, the ability to account for the important inputs to the response model; second, improved prediction accuracy and stability.