Predicting the churn of telecommunication service users using open source data mining tools

The paper presents a study focused on the problem of predicting the churn of telecommunication-service users. The transition of customers (users) to competitors is a significant business problem in areas with poor market differentiation of products and services, which is particularly evident in the market of telecommunication services. The paper evaluates the applicability of commonly used methods of data mining, available within a widely used data mining tool, to the problem. Experiments presented in the paper have been conducted based on real-world data provided for research purposes by Orange telecommunications company. Results indicate that boosting of simple classifiers achieves best results and that open-source tools can achieve performance very close to the best proprietary solutions.