Review of Data Mining Techniques for Churn Prediction in Telecom

Telecommunication sector generates a huge amount of data due to increasing number of subscribers, rapidly renewable technologies; data based applications and other value added service. This data can be usefully mined for churn analysis and prediction. Significant research had been undertaken by researchers worldwide to understand the data mining practices that can be used for predicting customer churn. This paper provides a review of around 100 recent journal articles starting from year 2000 to present the various data mining techniques used in multiple customer based churn models. It then summarizes the existing telecom literature by highlighting the sample size used, churn variables employed and the findings of different DM techniques. Finally, we list the most popular techniques for churn prediction in telecom as decision trees, regression analysis and clustering, thereby providing a roadmap to new researchers to build upon novel churn management models.