Customer churn analysis using XGBoosted decision trees

Abstract

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an important element in all forms of industry. This process involves ensuring that the customers of a business are satisfied with the product or services that they are paying for. Since most businesses collect and store large volumes of data about their customers; it is easy for the data analysts to use that data and perform predictive analysis. One aspect of this includes customer retention and customer churn. Customer churn is defined as the concept of understanding whether or not a customer of the company will stop using the product or service in future. In this paper a supervised machine learning algorithm has been implemented using Python to perform customer churn analysis on a given data-set of Telco, a mobile telecommunication company. This is achieved by building a decision tree model based on historical data provided by the company on the platform of Kaggle. This report also investigates the utility of extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) library in the gradient boosting framework (XGB) of Python for its portable and flexible functionality which can be used to solve many data science related problems highly efficiently. The implementation result shows the accuracy is comparatively improved in XGBoost than other learning models.