• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.125-140
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• 2013

We call a data set in which the number of records belonging to a certain class far outnumbers the number of records belonging to the other class, 'imbalanced data set'. Most of the classification techniques perform poorly on imbalanced data sets. When we evaluate the performance of a certain classification technique, we need to measure not only 'accuracy' but also 'sensitivity' and 'specificity'. In a customer churn prediction problem, 'retention' records account for the majority class, and 'churn' records account for the minority class. Sensitivity measures the proportion of actual retentions which are correctly identified as such. Specificity measures the proportion of churns which are correctly identified as such. The poor performance of the classification techniques on imbalanced data sets is due to the low value of specificity. Many previous researches on imbalanced data sets employed 'oversampling' technique where members of the minority class are sampled more than those of the majority class in order to make a relatively balanced data set. When a classification model is constructed using this oversampled balanced data set, specificity can be improved but sensitivity will be decreased. In this research, we developed a hybrid model of support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN) and decision tree, that improves specificity while maintaining sensitivity. We named this hybrid model 'hybrid SVM model.' The process of construction and prediction of our hybrid SVM model is as follows. By oversampling from the original imbalanced data set, a balanced data set is prepared. SVM_I model and ANN_I model are constructed using the imbalanced data set, and SVM_B model is constructed using the balanced data set. SVM_I model is superior in sensitivity and SVM_B model is superior in specificity. For a record on which both SVM_I model and SVM_B model make the same prediction, that prediction becomes the final solution. If they make different prediction, the final solution is determined by the discrimination rules obtained by ANN and decision tree. For a record on which SVM_I model and SVM_B model make different predictions, a decision tree model is constructed using ANN_I output value as input and actual retention or churn as target. We obtained the following two discrimination rules: 'IF ANN_I output value <0.285, THEN Final Solution = Retention' and 'IF ANN_I output value ${\geq}0.285$, THEN Final Solution = Churn.' The threshold 0.285 is the value optimized for the data used in this research. The result we present in this research is the structure or framework of our hybrid SVM model, not a specific threshold value such as 0.285. Therefore, the threshold value in the above discrimination rules can be changed to any value depending on the data. In order to evaluate the performance of our hybrid SVM model, we used the 'churn data set' in UCI Machine Learning Repository, that consists of 85% retention customers and 15% churn customers. Accuracy of the hybrid SVM model is 91.08% that is better than that of SVM_I model or SVM_B model. The points worth noticing here are its sensitivity, 95.02%, and specificity, 69.24%. The sensitivity of SVM_I model is 94.65%, and the specificity of SVM_B model is 67.00%. Therefore the hybrid SVM model developed in this research improves the specificity of SVM_B model while maintaining the sensitivity of SVM_I model.