Top-up Frequency Forecasting for Lao Telecommunication Company Using Time-Series Analysis

Abstract

The study aimed to forecast the top-up frequency for Lao Telecommunication Company (LTC) customers using time-series analysis. Accurate forecasts help the company optimize resource allocation, improve customer service, and boost revenue by anticipating customer demand. The time-series analysis techniques are employed, such as autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average + exogenous variables (SARIMAX) and exponential smoothing (ETS) models, to analyze historical top-up data. The data is pre-processed, identified patterns, and trained the model to forecast future top-up frequencies. The model's predictions closely aligned with the actual data, indicating its effectiveness. The ARIMA model produced reliable forecasts for short-term top-up frequencies, showing the best performance overall with the lowest RMSE and MAE, and a positive R-squared indicating some ability to explain the data. SARIMAX and EST both perform poorly, with very high RMSE and MAE, and negative R-squared values. The results demonstrated that time-series analysis could enhance decision-making in the telecommunications industry by enabling better forecasting of customer behavior. This helps in optimizing marketing strategies, inventory management, and service availability.