Identifying customers who are more likely to respond to a mail or call is an important issue in direct marketing, and constructing response model is an effective approach to solve this problem. Logistic regression and neural network are two of the most commonly used models in direct marketing. However, both models have their own limitations. Based on the group method of data handling (GMDH) theory, in this study we propose a weighted bagging GMDH model (WB-GMDH) as a response model. First, multiple GMDH models are trained with bootstrap replicas of the original data set. Then, the final classification results are produced by aggregating the outputs of the base GMDH models based on the weights, which are computed according to the classification accuracy of each base model in the validation data set. The model is applied to two real-world data sets and its performance is measured by accuracy, ROC curve and lift chart. The results show that the WB-GMDH model has better performance than other models. Finally, analyses are carried out according to the explicit expression obtained from this model, which will help marketing analysts to develop new business plans better.
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