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ASIAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ISSN: 0976-3376


Asian Journal of Science and Technology
Vol. 4, Issue 11, pp.227-233, November, 2013

REVIEW ARTICLE
FACT - AN ADAPTIVE CUSTOMER CHURN RATE PREDICTION METHOD USING FUZZY MUTI-CRITERIA CLASSIFICATION APPROACH FOR DECISION MAKING *Sakthikumar Subramanian
Ford Technology Services India, Campus 1B, RMZ Millenia, Dr.MGR Road, Perungudi, Chennai 600096, India

ARTICLE INFO
Article History:
Received 22nd August, 2013 Received in revised form 01st September, 2013 Accepted 18th October, 2013 Published online 19th November, 2013

ABSTRACT
This paper applies fuzzy multi-criteria classification approach for identifying the issues behind customer churn. Research work in the field of customer churn is recognized as a major criteria behind improving business and adhering intelligence. Any customer is considered as a valuable asset for a product and marketing concern, hence various product manufacturing and marketing firms lays its weight age on methods to maintain the customers. This paper suggests the reasons behind customer churn and applies fuzzy multi-criteria approach to determine the issues behind churn.

Key words:
Customer churn, Fuzzy multi-criteria approach, Business Intelligence Copyright 2013 Sakthikumar Subramanian. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

INTRODUCTION
Churn prediction rate is considered as a vital method to predict customer at 'churn risk' for any organization or firm. By understanding the accuracy in prediction of churners (Coussement, Van Den Poel, 2006) and non-churners, a company can use its limited marketing resources efficiently to target the churn customers in a retention marketing campaign. Need for effective analysis and accuracy of predicting the churners is major aspect of evaluating the churn prediction models. Churn prediction models (Abdolreza Eshghi et al., 2007; Bendapudi and Berry, 1997; Berry et al., 2000) are expected to be accurate and comprehensible, hence fuzzy and rule based systems can be recognized as a convenient tool for handling continuous variables in rule-based systems (Russell and Norvig, 1995). Multiple issues contribute to customer churn rate which includes customer demographic information, socio-economic information, salary of person as well in environmental situations. Probability theory can be used to formally represent information in stochastic decision environments, which represents uncertainty associated with the randomness of events. The fuzzy set theory also seeks to represent the uncertainty associated with vague, inaccurate or independently unrelated information. These sets were developed by Lotfi Zadeh (Madden et al., 1999) and later improvised (Murray, 1991) for data mining. It is observed that the present day complex database systems are dynamic and
*Corresponding author: Sakthikumar Subramanian

volatile in their behaviour, hence a great uncertainty is associated with regular data update and maintenance due to unexpected overloads, failures and disturbances. Since such systems defy from accurate analytical modeling approach, fuzzy logic appears to be a promising approach to address key aspects of data monitoring and handling. The ability to model such systems in the continuum mathematics of fuzzy sets rather than with traditional discrete values, coupled with extensive simulation, offers a reasonable compromise between rigorous analytical modeling and purely qualitative simulation (Fornell, 1992). This paper studies Decision Tree Algorithm (Kauffman, 1993) and Hill Climbing Algorithm (Jacobson and Ycesan, 1998) along with SMOTE (ETRI 2002) for indentifying the Customer Churn Prediction, which are the basic conventional sampling techniques adopted in Data Mining domain. The experimental results reveal that these models never always improve the accuracy of Customer Churn Prediction for a given data set. Fig. 1 shows a clustered format of customer shown as A, B based on customer buying interests for a specific domain of products, while C shows customers who possess interests in buying both A and B. The customers who join in the intersection demonstrate multiple interest of purchasing a product fall into the category of abstain from buying the product. This study on BI carried out by Iansiti et al. (1997), suggests that data mining tools assist in multiple CRM dimensions. Classification and Clustering tools (Michael T. Pich, Christoph H. Loch, 2002) are frequently used to handle customer churn prediction and related business intelligence

Ford Technology Services India, Campus 1B, RMZ Millenia, Dr.MGR Road, Perungudi, Chennai 600096

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Fig. 1. Customer prediction and analysis based on classification approach

mechanisms. Several classification techniques had been applied in order to distinguish between churners and nonchurners. Computational approaches or techniques include neural networks, decision trees and logistic regression (Heyman and Sobel, 1984). Gerpott et al. (2001) and Ahmad et al. (2002) classifies customer churn rate based on predictor variables, which can be classified into three categories (a) behavioral antecedents of customers, (b) demographics of customers and (c) perceptional measures. This paper seeks to introduce a new churn predictor which measures the similarity of the product sequence first purchased with churner and nonchurner sequences. These sequences of first purchase events are modeled as a Fuzzy multi criteria Decision Making process (Coussement and Van Den Poel, 2006; Zadeh, 1965). Fuzzy multi-criteria decision making modeling approach is a highly valuable tool for decision makers involved in selecting, evaluating and ranking problems based on finite set of conflicting criteria. The Fuzzy multi-criteria decision making approach (FMCDM) had been applied in selection, ranking and evaluation approaches, which support solutions for prediction and forecasting. This paper is arranged in the following sections. Section-1 focuses on customer churn and chances of churn in a market study. Section-2 surveys on existing customer churn approach and suggest the need for demand based approach to identify chances and reasons for customer churn using algorithmic approaches. Section-3 elaborates on fuzzy multi-criterion decision making approach for customer churn called FACT. Section-4 discusses on methods and steps involved in formulating the approach while Section-5 discusses on performance analysis and Section-6 summarizes work carried out with scope for future work. Literature Survey Customer satisfaction and retention research is a major segments of the product marketing research firm (Ahmad, R, Buttle, 2002; Dick and Basu, 1994. "Customer churn" can be defined as the tendency of customers to avoid buying a product or methodology of neglect the process of carrying business with a company within a specific time period as defined by Dang Van Mien (Dang Van Mien, 1999). Churn prediction is a useful tool to predict customer at churn risk. The purpose of churn prediction is to classify the customers into two types: (a) customers who churn (leave the company) and (b) customer who continue doing their business with company.

The accurate prediction of churners and non-churners helps in the company to adopt specific marketing resource efficiently to target the churner customers in a retention marketing campaign. Gremler (1995) worked on FMCDM for measuring usefulness of successful knowledge management implementation. Similarly working on the methods to find critical criteria for evaluating the quality of a product developed by Cooper et al. (1987), Cooper (1994) and in wireless telecommunication industry by Abdolreza Eshghi et al. (2007). The method to measure the performance of software development projects using FMCDM was carried out by Conrow (2000). Hee-Su Kim et al. (2004) and Moon-Koo et al. (2004) adopted similar approach to evaluate the performance of Mobile telephony market at Korea. Based on these literature survey, FACT model is being modeled to effectively evaluate the Customer Churn rate in an marketing mall based on various customer influential factors and their success impact works on the fuzzy environment. Buckinx et al measures the loyalty and churn rate differently in retail setting as loyal customers who carry out business in a particular store but suddenly switch to another store due to multiple physiological and logical factors which in return affect the business of a market store. Lai Fujun et al. (2009) has carried out research on customer profitability in Chinese telecom but the study is based on customer survey by mail which helped to understand the customers share of wallet, satisfaction and loyalty from the qualitative factors. Larivire et al. (2004) elaborated on customer churn at financial service markets, while Oh (1995) made an empirical survey on customer churn at restaurants. Decision trees are much useful techniques for classification, primarily due to their ease of use and interpretability. This technique is variable scale independent and can deal with nominal variables. Nevertheless, conventional decision trees present several disadvantages, such as instability (Russell and Norvig, 1995) and suboptimal performance (Terry Manski and McFadden, 1981). Many data mining classification techniques have been used as churn prediction techniques by research community (Umera Hallowell, 1996). Madden et al. (1999) proposed neural networks which have been frequently used in this context (Bendapudi and Berry, 1997). It can be understood that most of the traditional computational approaches does not suffice in voluminous data mining approach due its inconsistent data and multi-criterion approach. FACT interpretation FACT is interpreted using clustering approach wherein each data point belongs to a cluster to some degree which is specified by its membership grade. This method was introduced by Berry et al. (2000) and Cockerham (1979) where suppose a collection of n data point {n1, n2,,} resides in an p-dimensional space. The interpretations of the membership function can be evaluated within the framework of measurement theory (Cooper, 1994; Dick, Basu, 1994; Fornell, 1992). Measurement theory is concerned with representation and meaningfulness of the particular representation. fCR can be gathered and determined based on fuzzification process, which consists of four modules being, Fuzzifier: The fuzzifier performs the fuzzification function that converts three inputs into suitable linguistic values which are needed in the inference engine.

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Fuzzy rule base: The fuzzy rule base is composed of a set of linguistic control rules and the attendant control goals. Inference engine: The inference engine simulates human decision making based on the fuzzy control rules and the related input linguistic parameters. Defuzzifier: The defuzzifier acquires the aggregated linguistic values from the inferred fuzzy control action and generates a non-fuzzy control output, which represents the predicted speed. Multi-criteria for Decision Making: This method considers various metrics (parameters) involved in identifying or evaluation of decision making solution. To predict customer churn rate FCR using Fuzzy sets theory (Govindan et al., 2012), the notion of a membership function, (A) and its relation needs to be understood. If Ci ={c1,c2,cn} be well defined set of customers at churn in a market, and Oi be the set of possible Opinion Score where i={1,2,..n}, and then its mapping relation fCR ={f,h,a,v,r,p} for any Ci to Oi. If (x) be the degree to which a fuzzy variable x is a member of a set. A complete membership is represented by 1 and no membership by 0, while all other intermediate values fall into the problem domain between 0 and 1. The membership function (x), maps x into the interval [0, 1]. fCR (Xi) defines the fuzzy value for set of customers who are being authenticated based on its membership function (x).

Value, g has Acceptable Satisfaction, customers h, i, j and k possess Average Satisfaction, customers m and n has Poor Value.

Fig. 3. Customer churn based Fuzzy metrics adopted in fCR

The input to the fuzzifier represents set of customer satisfaction levels fCR parameters related to identifying an effective Opinion Score 'Oi' measure for routing between customer Ci and product purchased 'Pi' or churned. The ability of a customer to select or deselect a product is categorized on following fuzzy metrics: Socio-demographic attributes ( position occupied in a job, location) Regional Demographic attributes Environmental attributes Product demographic factors Product manufacturing firm factors As an example, IF the distance measure between a new product being marketed and product re-sold then its customer interest is intermediate and the current cost of product is low, THEN the estimated sales of the product during the next time period is low. The non fuzzy output of the defuzzifier can then be expressed as weighted average of each rules output. Fuzzy based Customer Satisfaction Metric Evaluation fCR

Fig. 2. fCR process of identifying the FACT

Definition 1: For customer at churn Ci, should possess a defined fuzzy value fCR, such that fCR {f,h,a,g,r,p} when it needs to be identified as customer who churn due to product inability or market unsatisfaction condition as within a Cluster Li or other Cluster Lj. Proof For all customers Ci in Cluster Li, where i= 1,2,n can follow a fuzzy value fCR. For any customer Ci Li there extends a relation as Ci X fCR (Oi). This same rule stands true also for all Cj Lj. fCR is a set of well defined values ranging anywhere between 0 to 1, such that each fCR value possess f=Best Satisfaction (1.0), h= High Satisfaction (0.8,0.9), a=Acceptable Satisfaction (0.6,0.7), g=Average Satisfaction (0.4,0.5), r= Poor Satisfaction (0.2,0.3) and p=Worst (0.0,0.1). Fig. 3 defines the fCR values based on varying customer rate at a period of time, where customer a, b, o and p possess Low value. Customers c, d, e, f and l possess High Satisfaction
Fig. 4. Issues lying behind customer loyalty

Adaptive Customer Churn fuzzy approach To measure the global or local churn fuzziness of a customer, a suitable membership function fCR should be defined. Different functions are already used in the literature, such as the standard S-function (Moon-Koo et al., 2004; Murray 1991) and the Huang and Wang function (Hee-Su Kim and ChoongHan Yoon, 2004). Tizhoosh (1998) defined the suitable threshold as fuzzy number (g) using LR function which is

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highly complex and does not converge to limits, hence primarily not used much in research work. The vertices of fuzzy A (x) in a fuzzy set A (L: lower boundary and H: upper boundary) The decision matrix (Eq-1) is defined as

number by considering / representing it as a fuzzy number seems to be beneficial. To identify the outcome of fuzzy multicriterion value of decision making involved for a customer churn is

Here Rj denotes the normalized influential parameters for jth customer and Qj denotes the normalized influential parameters of jth product to be bought. The FACT algorithm for thresholding based on measures of fuzziness and multicriterion can be formulated as follows: where decision matrix for weights of product evaluation and customer churn depends on influential factors Ci ( i=1,2,3...n) and Ri , where i=1,2,..m, which were asked for subjective measurements based on the importance of partnership quality factors using linguistic variables (Table 1). matrix defines m as number of customers who responded and n being the influential factors which determine the customer to buy that product or suggest a churn. Here A (xj) represents the fuzzy degree of impacts assessed by each jth customer. The subjective assessments of each customer differ with respect to average score rate which incorporates the fuzzy performance measure of 'm' customers, Eq-2 Step 1: Customer's subjective decisions use the lingustic variables (refer Table 1) for weights to understand the significance of variable constructs
Table 1. Linguistic scale for CFF
Linguistic Scale Strongly agree Agree Neither Agree or Disagree Disagree Strongly Disagree Corresponding CFF(customer influential factors) (0.9, 1.0) (0.7, 0.8) (0.6, 0.5) (0.4, 0.3) (0.2, 0.1)

Step 2: Customer's decisions on product definition as linguistic variable access the rating of influential factors of a product p as poor, a as below average, r as good, v as average and h as best (refer Table 2) Here j denotes (l, h) which denotes the low and high weight of the influential values suggested by customer. The Best Non Fuzzy performance (BNF) values are determined based on Eq-3, Step3: Linguistic evaluation is converted into multi-scalable fuzzy numbers to design the fuzzy decision making matrix and determine the fuzzy ratings (rate of each metric) of each factors. Step 4: Weighted performance interval of the fuzzy decision matrix is constructed (Table 2)
Table 2. Property / Rules to be adopted for fCR establishment as linguistic parameters which influence the buying of a product by customer

Here if x being the intermediate churn of customer level, which can be defined as a value for a non-churn customer value. gmin and gmax are the minimum and maximum fCR levels, which defines the greatest possibility for a customer to churn and T [0,L 1] is a suitable constant. and (0,) can be determined with respect to the service based edge properties of the defined FACT customer trust assignment. However, the proper selection of parameters is not easy and can add more complexity to the algorithm being adopted. Using a fuzzy number for calculation seems to be more natural since the usual approach of FACT classes adopts only a preferable single number (a unique threshold for the entire service). If this approach fails then an advanced techniques for adaptive thresholding are employed. A single threshold, globally determined for an entire applied service function or locally calculated for an entire service applied hence remains uncertain. Therefore, removing the uncertainty around a crisp

Step-5: The best non fuzzy performance values are determined using (1) and (2) Select the type of membership function based on service in use. Select a suitable measure of fuzziness (Eq. (1)) Calculate the mapping value Initialize the position of the membership function. Shift the membership function along the Customer trust level range (Fig. 2) and calculate in each position the amount of fuzziness, for instance using Eq. (1).

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Locate the position gopt with minimum/maximum fuzziness. Threshold the assigned service with T = gopt. The notion of fuzzy evaluation (Berry et al., 2000) is being defined as the degree of quality metric about the consistent behavior of system and entities in use. The customer trust evaluation FACT is based on the previous behavioral experience of customer with other entities and observation of its related actions (Dang Van Mien, 1999). The system had been incorporated as a unique mechanism of providing the customer trust, which can be interpreted as a relation of fCR among multiple customers who are willing to participate in various shareable services and handle resource management (Clemen, 1996). If fCR =0, the customer trust un-certainty prevails among customers when each customer requires one or more communication member to establish customer trusted communication among peer customers. FACT adopts the following rules for its update [a] Any customer Ci can participate in fCR assignment among other customers within cluster, in order to receive a FACT value and maintain its customer trust. [b] A customer maintains fCR value until its Time in Cluster (TCL) or Time Expiry (TEX) or when a new customer joins the cluster or when an existing customer leaves the cluster due to reduced satisfactory threshold. [c] TEX (Time Expiry) of a customer churn chance being generated on a random time scale. [e] A customer Ci resides in a Cluster which does not adopt any defined time limits. The Fuzzy Customer trust Value fCR at any instance depends on TEX for its update The process of issuing or updating a fCR value for a customer service follows the steps [Fig. 4]:

Step3: The coordinator requests each customer Ci within Cluster to vote for another customer churn. Step 4: Based on Eq (2), the coordinator identifies the fCR value for customer Ci Step 5: Coordinator assigns the value to customer Ci, whose activity is determined based on Eq(4). Step 6: New customer Ck joins the cluster, Cluster coordinator requests its Identity and updates. Step 7: Step-1 to Step-5 had to be follow, to re-new fCR for all customers in Cluster. Step 8: Customer Ci moves from cluster, hence repeat Step7 Results and Performance Analysis The final outcome of customer churn reports on the following factors which are highly influential in determining the chance for a customer churn. Based on various literature survey and studies the research work started with identifying the factors influencing customer churn. 10 different factors were identified such as knowledge of product, customer trust initiation, commitment of product usage, social interaction and awareness, absorptive capacity, arduous relationship, product relational factors were few. From these factors 15 influential factors can be considered from service provider perspective based on three major dimensions, cost, service quality and satisfaction utility. The analysis used as case study reported in this paper is based on transactional data of customers using a credit based loyalty card. This database includes 1120 records of customers who shopped in two major hypermarkets in Bangalore city, India during period January 2010 to December 2011. Each transaction includes client identity number, date

Fig. 4. Process of initiate and updation of fCR

Step 1: Customer Ci requests its identification through Cluster coordinator Step 2: Each customer Ci issues its existing fCR to customer cluster Coordinator

and time of transaction, product transacted and cost involved in transaction for each product. The record set also maintains the other features such as number of times the product is purchased, time taken in buying the product (involves in decision making), number of changes involved in buying the

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product. This study involves number of new customers, since it is only for those customers that it is possible to trace the first category purchase sequence. The study involves number of old customers involved over period of three years and their product buying pattern. New customers are considered as those who made no purchase in the first half of 2010 but spent at least 100 Rupees up to 1000 rupees until December of 2011. This corresponds to a total of 15.147 % of new customers. Analysis carried out on old customers with an increase of Rs 1000 as minimal purchase up to Rs 10000 as maximal purchase, which showed an incremental of 17.825% buying phenomena and 8.723% as churners each month. From data, according to multi-criterion fuzzy based approach discussed in Section 3.1 to identify partial churners, not less than 29% partially churned during the period of analysis, while the remaining stayed active. To evaluate the impact of the inclusion of the sequence likelihood variables using partial churn prediction models, the prediction performance of FACT model is compared with Decision Tree approach and CCHUM which includes multi criteria based variables. The performance of the model includes only the recency, frequency, monetary value and increased or decreased tendency.

shows minimal of 60% of churn rate but suddenly reduces to less than 4% over a period of time. Hence Decision Tree approach cannot perform consistently over large record sets. Fig. 6 shows the performance of FACT approach over CCHUM a bee hive based classification approach. It can be understood from figure that FACT shows a consistent customer churn rate in prediction varying between 70% to less than 48.52%, while CCHUM shows a higher customer churn rate ranging between 72.18% on average for minimal records to maximum of 80.95%. The threshold value used to compute fCR for FACT classification techniques is the value which allows a percentage of partial churners of approximately 5% to be obtained from the case study which includes the sequence likelihood variables. Conclusion Customer retention rate has a strong impact on the customer lifetime value, and understanding the true value of a possible customer churn will help the company in its customer relationship management. Conventional statistical methods are very successful in predicting a customer churn. This paper proposes a model called FACT, which adopts a fuzzy multicriterion based decision making model which involves multiple criterion parameter based classification for identifying the customer churn in a market mall. The results reported highlights the relevance of the proposed model FACT compared with other non-fuzzy approaches, since the performance of the FACT includes the sequence likelihood variables is higher than the performance of the models not including these variables. This study also involved analysis of sequences of product being purchased by groups of customers, while future studies involve combination of customer perception information, collected by means of surveys and complaints analysis.

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Fig. 5. Customer Churn analysis shown using FACT and DTA approaches

Fig. 6. Performance of Customer Churn using FACT and CCHUM models

Fig. 5 shows the analysis of FACT based on customer churn rate and number of records handled with around 1000 records maintained. FACT shows an average of 7.50% to 10.00% increase in customer churn rate while Decision Tree approach

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