Data preparation using data quality matrices for classification mining

Data mining aims to find patterns in organizational databases. However, most techniques in mining do not consider knowledge of the quality of the database. In this work, we show how to incorporate into classification mining recent advances in the data quality field that view a database as the product of an imprecise manufacturing process where the flaws/defects are captured in quality matrices. We develop a general purpose method of incorporating data quality matrices into the data mining classification task. Our work differs from existing data preparation techniques since while other approaches detect and fix errors to ensure consistency with the entire data set our work makes use of the apriori knowledge of how the data is produced/manufactured.     

A reference model for customer-centric data mining with support vector machines

Supervised classification is an important part of corporate data mining to support decision making in customer-centric planning tasks. The paper proposes a hierarchical reference model for support vector machine based classification within this discipline. The approach balances the conflicting goals of transparent yet accurate models and compares favourably to alternative classifiers in a large-scale empirical evaluation in real-world customer relationship management applications. Recent advances in support vector machine oriented research are incorporated to approach feature, instance and model selection in a unified framework.     

A hierarchical multiple kernel support vector machine for customer churn prediction using longitudinal behavioral data

The availability of abundant data posts a challenge to integrate static customer data and longitudinal behavioral data to improve performance in customer churn prediction. Usually, longitudinal behavioral data are transformed into static data before being included in a prediction model. In this study, a framework with ensemble techniques is presented for customer churn prediction directly using longitudinal behavioral data. A novel approach called the hierarchical multiple kernel support vector machine (H-MK-SVM) is formulated. A three phase training algorithm for the H-MK-SVM is developed, implemented and tested. The H-MK-SVM constructs a classification function by estimating the coefficients of both static and longitudinal behavioral variables in the training process without transformation of the longitudinal behavioral data. The training process of the H-MK-SVM is also a feature selection and time subsequence selection process because the sparse non-zero coefficients correspond to the variables selected. Computational experiments using three real-world databases were conducted. Computational results using multiple criteria measuring performance show that the H-MK-SVM directly using longitudinal behavioral data performs better than currently available classifiers.