Impact of Social Network to Churn in Mobile Network

Abstract

As the telecommunications sector has reached its mature stage, maintaining existing users has become crucial for service providers. Analyzing the call data records, it is possible to observe their users in the context of social network and obtain additional insights about the spread of influence among interconnected users, which is relevant to churn. In this paper, we examine the communication patterns of mobile phone users and subscription plan logs. Our goal is to use a simple model to predict which users are most likely to churn, solely by observing each user's social network, which is formed by outgoing calls, and churn among their neighbours. To measure the importance of social network parameters with regard to churn prediction, we compare three models: spatial classification, regression model, and artificial neural networks. For each subscriber, we observe three social network parameters, the number of neighbors that have churned, the number of calls to these neighbors, and the duration of these calls for different time periods. The results indicate that using only one or two of these parameters yields results that are comparable or better than the complex models with large amounts of individual and/or social network input parameters that other researchers have proposed.