Transfer Learning and Meta Classification Based Deep Churn Prediction System for Telecom Industry

A churn prediction system guides telecom service providers to reduce revenue loss. Development of a churn prediction system for a telecom industry is a challenging task, mainly due to size of the data, high dimensional features, and imbalanced distribution of the data. In this paper, we focus on a novel solution to the inherent problems of churn prediction, using the concept of Transfer Learning (TL) and Ensemble-based Meta-Classification. The proposed method TL-DeepE is applied in two stages. The first stage employs TL by fine tuning multiple pre-trained Deep Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs). Telecom datasets are in vector form, which is converted into 2D images because Deep CNNs have high learning capacity on images. In the second stage, predictions from these Deep CNNs are appended to the original feature vector and thus are used to build a final feature vector for the high-level Genetic Programming and AdaBoost based ensemble classifier. Thus, the experiments are conducted using various CNNs as base classifiers with the contribution of high-level GP-AdaBoost ensemble classifier, and the results achieved are as an average of the outcomes. By using 10-fold cross-validation, the performance of the proposed TL-DeepE system is compared with existing techniques, for two standard telecommunication datasets; Orange and Cell2cell. In experimental result, the prediction accuracy for Orange and Cell2cell datasets were as 75.4% and 68.2% and a score of the area under the curve as 0.83 and 0.74, respectively.