• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.97-117
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• 2021

Predicting term deposit subscriptions is one of representative financial marketing in banks, and banks can build a prediction model using various customer information. In order to improve the classification accuracy for term deposit subscriptions, many studies have been conducted based on machine learning techniques. However, even if these models can achieve satisfactory performance, utilizing them is not an easy task in the industry when their decision-making process is not adequately explained. To address this issue, this paper proposes an explainable scheme for term deposit subscription forecasting. For this, we first construct several classification models using decision tree-based ensemble learning methods, which yield excellent performance in tabular data, such as random forest, gradient boosting machine (GBM), extreme gradient boosting (XGB), and light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM). We then analyze their classification performance in depth through 10-fold cross-validation. After that, we provide the rationale for interpreting the influence of customer information and the decision-making process by applying Shapley additive explanation (SHAP), an explainable artificial intelligence technique, to the best classification model. To verify the practicality and validity of our scheme, experiments were conducted with the bank marketing dataset provided by Kaggle; we applied the SHAP to the GBM and LightGBM models, respectively, according to different dataset configurations and then performed their analysis and visualization for explainable term deposit subscriptions.