An early warning model for customer churn prediction in telecommunication sector based on improved bat algorithm to optimize ELM

The competition in the telecommunications industry is mainly reflected in the competition for the number of key customers. Therefore, how to effectively prevent the loss of large customers is a problem that many telecommunications companies are very concerned about. This paper establishes a customer churn prediction model based on the improved bat algorithm (IBA) optimized extreme learning machine (ELM), with the purpose of discovering potential churn customers in time and taking measures to retain them in advance. This paper uses the IBA to optimize the initial random weights of the ELM, so as to improve the prediction accuracy of the ELM. To overcome the shortcomings of the bat algorithm (BA) that the convergence speed is too slow in the early stage and difficult to converge in the later stage, this paper introduces the inertia weight into the speed update formula. To improve the population diversity and local search ability of the BA, this paper adds a chaotic local search method to balance the global search ability of the BA in the early stage. To control the search range of the BAs in the later stage, the lane flight formula is introduced into the position update formula to speed up the convergence speed of the algorithm. Then according to the result of function optimization, it can be seen that IBA has a significant improvement in convergence speed and accuracy. Finally, IBA was used to optimize ELM, and a customer churn prediction model was established. The empirical results show that the predictive model proposed in this paper can effectively identify lost customers and lay a foundation for improving the competitiveness of the telecommunications industry in the future.