Predicting Customer Churn: Extreme Gradient Boosting with Temporal Data
This addresses customer retention for businesses, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a specific domain.
The paper tackled predicting customer churn using temporal data by applying XGBoost with effective feature engineering, achieving first place out of 575 teams in the WSDM Cup 2018 Churn Challenge.
Accurately predicting customer churn using large scale time-series data is a common problem facing many business domains. The creation of model features across various time windows for training and testing can be particularly challenging due to temporal issues common to time-series data. In this paper, we will explore the application of extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) on a customer dataset with a wide-variety of temporal features in order to create a highly-accurate customer churn model. In particular, we describe an effective method for handling temporally sensitive feature engineering. The proposed model was submitted in the WSDM Cup 2018 Churn Challenge and achieved first-place out of 575 teams.