Churn Buster: Uncovering Patterns and Predicting Churn in OTT Platforms

Churn, a common concern among business leaders, poses a significant challenge in today's fast-paced world where consumer attention spans are short. This research focuses on churn analysis within the OTT streaming platform sector, essential for retaining subscribers and ensuring business longevity. Utilising data preprocessing methods and machine learning algorithms, this study aims to identify factors influencing churn and provide insights for targeted retention strategies. The dataset includes 16 variables, with churn serving as the binary-dependent variable. Data preprocessing involved addressing missing values and converting categorical data into numerical format. Four machine learning models-Random Forest, XGBoost, K-Nearest Neighbors, and Support Vector Machine-were applied, with Random Forest achieving the highest accuracy of 89%. Evaluation metrics like confusion matrices, ROC curves, and Precision-Recall curves were used to evaluate model performance, revealing Random Forest's effectiveness in churn prediction. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was employed to handle the complexity of user data, aiding in the identification of influential churn factors. This study emphasises the importance of understanding customer behaviour and utilising machine learning to forecast subscription choices. The insights gained provide valuable guidance to OTT companies for enhancing customer satisfaction and retention strategies, ensuring competitiveness in a dynamic industry landscape.