Ensemble Methods in Customer Churn Prediction: A Comparative Analysis of the State-of-the-Art

In the past several single classifiers, homogeneous and heterogeneous ensembles have been proposed to detect the customers who are most likely to churn. Despite the popularity and accuracy of heterogeneous ensembles in various domains, customer churn prediction models have not yet been picked up. Moreover, there are other developments in the performance evaluation and model comparison level that have not been introduced in a systematic way. Therefore, the aim of this study is to perform a large scale benchmark study in customer churn prediction implementing these novel methods. To do so, we benchmark 33 classifiers, including 6 single classifiers, 14 homogeneous, and 13 heterogeneous ensembles across 11 datasets. Our findings indicate that heterogeneous ensembles are consistently ranked higher than homogeneous ensembles and single classifiers. It is observed that a heterogeneous ensemble with simulated annealing classifier selection is ranked the highest in terms of AUC and expected maximum profits. For accuracy, F1 measure and top-decile lift, a heterogenous ensemble optimized by non-negative binomial likelihood, and a stacked heterogeneous ensemble are, respectively, the top ranked classifiers. Our study contributes to the literature by being the first to include such an extensive set of classifiers, performance metrics, and statistical tests in a benchmark study of customer churn.