CRATSM: An Effective Hybridization of Deep Neural Models for Customer Retention Prediction in the Telecom Industry

Abstract

In the dynamic field of Customer Retention Prediction (CRP), strategic marketing and promotion efforts targeting specific customers are crucial. Understanding customer behavior and identifying churn indicators are vital for devising effective retention strategies. However, identifying customers likely to terminate services presents a challenge, leading to data imbalance issues. Existing CRP studies using Machine Learning (ML) techniques and data imbalance methods face problems such as overfitting and computational complexity. Similarly, recent CRP studies employing Deep Learning (DL) approaches rely on data sampling techniques, which can result in overfitting and a lack of cost sensitivity. Additionally, DL approaches struggle with slow convergence and get stuck in local minima. This paper introduces an effective hybrid of Deep Learning (DL) classifiers focusing on cost-metric integration to address data imbalance issues and period-shift Cosine Annealing Learning Rate (ps-CALR) to accelerate model training, ultimately enhancing performance. Three Telecom datasets, namely IBM, Iranian, and Orange, were used to assess the model performance. Empirical findings show that the hybrid DL classifiers significantly improved CRP over conventional ML. This paper contributes methodological advancements and practical insights for effective customer retention in the telecom industry.