A genetic programming based framework for churn prediction in telecommunication industry

Customer defection is critically important since it leads to serious business loss. Therefore, investigating methods to identify defecting customers (i.e. churners) has become a priority for telecommunication operators. In this paper, a churn prediction framework is proposed aiming at enhancing the ability to forecast customer churn. The framework combine two heuristic approaches: Self Organizing Maps (SOM) and Genetic Programming (GP). At first, SOM is used to cluster the customers in the dataset, and then remove outliers representing abnormal customer behaviors. After that, GP is used to build an enhanced classification tree. The dataset used for this study contains anonymized real customer information provided by a major local telecom operator in Jordan. Our work shows that using the proposed method surpasses various state-of-the-art classification methods for this particular dataset. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.