This project was carried out for a company named Attollo, a consulting firm specialized in Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management. The project aims to explore a new area for Attollo, predictive analytics, which is then applied to Klarna, a client of Attollo. Attollo has a partnership with IBM, which sells services for predictive analytics. The tool that this project is carried out with, is a software from IBM: SPSS Modeler. Five different examples are given of what and how the predictive work that was carried out at Klarna consisted of. From these examples, the different predictive models' functionality are described. The result of this project demonstrates, by using predictive analytics, how predictive models can be created. The conclusion is that predictive analytics enables companies to understand their customers better and hence make better decisions. / Detta projekt har utforts tillsammans med ett foretag som heter Attollo, en konsultfirma som ar specialiserade inom Business Intelligence & Coporate Performance Management. Projektet grundar sig pa att Attollo ville utforska ett nytt omrade, prediktiv analys, som sedan applicerades pa Klarna, en kund till Attollo. Attollo har ett partnerskap med IBM, som saljer tjanster for prediktiv analys. Verktyget som detta projekt utforts med, ar en mjukvara fran IBM: SPSS Modeler. Fem olika exempel beskriver det prediktiva arbetet som utfordes vid Klarna. Fran dessa exempel beskrivs ocksa de olika prediktiva modellernas funktionalitet. Resultatet av detta projekt visar hur man genom prediktiv analys kan skapa prediktiva modeller. Slutsatsen ar att prediktiv analys ger foretag storre mojlighet att forsta sina kunder och darav kunna gora battre beslut.

Customer churn is a critical problem faced by telecom companies, leading to lost revenue and increased marketing costs. In the highly competitive telecommunication sector, customer retention is essential for success. It costs five to seven times more toacquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Considering this, churnprediction models are increasingly becoming an important tool for telecommunicationorganizations looking to minimize their customer attrition rate. Churn, or customer attrition, is a major problem for businesses in the telecommunications sector. Every year,millions of customers switch to new service providers, resulting in billions of dollarsin lost revenue. In the ever- evolving and highly competitive world of telecommunications, businesses are constantly looking for new ways to improve customer loyaltyand reduce customer churn. Machine learning techniques can be incredibly useful inthis endeavor. This study proposes a customer churn prediction model using machinelearning techniques to help telecom companies retain customers and reduce churn rates.The proposed model analyzes big data using machine learning algorithms, including KNearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR),Random Forest (RF), Adaboost, Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM), GradientBoosting, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) to predict customer churn. The proposed model achieves high accuracy score of 95.74% with the XGBoost and LGBMclassifier. The results demonstrate that machine learning algorithms have the potentialto predict customer churn effectively and provide insights into the primary drivers ofcustomer churn.

No description available.

Customer churn is problematic for any business trying to expand their customer base. The acquisition of new customers to replace churned ones are associated with additional costs, whereas taking measures to retain existing customers may prove more cost efficient. As such, it is of interest to estimate the time until the occurrence of a potential churn for every customer in order to take preventive measures. The application of deep learning and machine learning to this type of problem using time series data is relatively new and there is a lot of recent research on this topic. This thesis is based on the assumption that early signs of churn can be detected by the temporal changes in customer behavior. Recurrent neural networks and more specifically long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) are suitable contenders since they are designed to take the sequential time aspect of the data into account. Random forest (RF) and stochastic vector machine (SVM) are machine learning models that are frequently used in related research. The problem is solved through a classification approach, and a comparison is done with implementations using LSTM, GRU, RF, and SVM. According to the results, LSTM and GRU perform similarly while being slightly better than RF and SVM in the task of predicting customers that will churn in the coming six months, and that all models could potentially lead to cost savings according to simulations (using non-official but reasonable costs assigned to each prediction outcome). Predicting the time until churn is a more difficult problem and none of the models can give reliable estimates, but all models are significantly better than random predictions. / Kundbortfall är problematiskt för företag som försöker expandera sin kundbas. Förvärvandet av nya kunder för att ersätta förlorade kunder är associerat med extra kostnader, medan vidtagandet av åtgärder för att behålla kunder kan visa sig mer lönsamt. Som så är det av intresse att för varje kund ha pålitliga tidsestimat till en potentiell uppsägning kan tänkas inträffa så att förebyggande åtgärder kan vidtas. Applicerandet av djupinlärning och maskininlärning på denna typ av problem som involverar tidsseriedata är relativt nytt och det finns mycket ny forskning kring ämnet. Denna uppsats är baserad på antagandet att tidiga tecken på kundbortfall kan upptäckas genom kunders användarmönster över tid. Reccurent neural networks och mer specifikt long short-term memory (LSTM) och gated recurrent unit (GRU) är lämpliga modellval eftersom de är designade att ta hänsyn till den sekventiella tidsaspekten i tidsseriedata. Random forest (RF) och stochastic vector machine (SVM) är maskininlärningsmodeller som ofta används i relaterad forskning. Problemet löses genom en klassificeringsapproach, och en jämförelse utförs med implementationer av LSTM, GRU, RF och SVM. Resultaten visar att LSTM och GRU presterar likvärdigt samtidigt som de presterar bättre än RF och SVM på problemet om att förutspå kunder som kommer att säga upp sig inom det kommande halvåret, och att samtliga modeller potentiellt kan leda till kostnadsbesparingar enligt simuleringar (som använder icke-officiella men rimliga kostnader associerat till varje utfall). Att förutspå tid till en kunduppsägning är ett svårare problem och ingen av de framtagna modellerna kan ge pålitliga tidsestimat, men alla är signifikant bättre än slumpvisa gissningar.

Churn prediction is a critical task for businesses to retain their valuable customers. This paper presents a comprehensive study of churn prediction in the telecom sector using 15 approaches, including popular algorithms such as Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and AdaBoost. The study is segmented into three sets of experiments, each focusing on a different approach to building the churn prediction model. The model is constructed using the original training set in the first set of experiments. The second set involves oversampling the training set to address the issue of imbalanced data. Lastly, the third set combines oversampling with recursive feature selection to enhance the model's performance further. The results demonstrate that the Adaptive Boost classifier, implemented with oversampling and recursive feature selection, outperforms the other 14 techniques. It achieves the highest rank in all three evaluation metrics: recall (0.841), f1-score (0.655), and roc_auc (0.793), further indicating that the proposed approach effectively predicts churn and provides valuable insights into customer behavior.

Churn prediction methods are widely used in Customer Relationship Management and have proven to be valuable for retaining customers. To obtain a high predictive performance, recent studies rely on increasingly complex machine learning methods, such as ensemble or hybrid models. However, the more complex a model is, the more difficult it becomes to understand how decisions are actually made. Previous studies on machine learning interpretability have used a global perspective for understanding black-box models. This study explores the use of local explanation models for explaining the individual predictions of a Random Forest ensemble model. The churn prediction was studied on the users of Tink – a finance app. This thesis aims to take local explanations one step further by making comparisons between churn indicators of different user groups. Three sets of groups were created based on differences in three user features. The importance scores of all globally found churn indicators were then computed for each group with the help of local explanation models. The results showed that the groups did not have any significant differences regarding the globally most important churn indicators. Instead, differences were found for globally less important churn indicators, concerning the type of information that users stored in the app. In addition to comparing churn indicators between user groups, the result of this study was a well-performing Random Forest ensemble model with the ability of explaining the reason behind churn predictions for individual users. The model proved to be significantly better than a number of simpler models, with an average AUC of 0.93. / Metoder för att prediktera utträde är vanliga inom Customer Relationship Management och har visat sig vara värdefulla när det kommer till att behålla kunder. För att kunna prediktera utträde med så hög säkerhet som möjligt har den senasteforskningen fokuserat på alltmer komplexa maskininlärningsmodeller, såsom ensembler och hybridmodeller. En konsekvens av att ha alltmer komplexa modellerär dock att det blir svårare och svårare att förstå hur en viss modell har kommitfram till ett visst beslut. Tidigare studier inom maskininlärningsinterpretering har haft ett globalt perspektiv för att förklara svårförståeliga modeller. Denna studieutforskar lokala förklaringsmodeller för att förklara individuella beslut av en ensemblemodell känd som 'Random Forest'. Prediktionen av utträde studeras påanvändarna av Tink – en finansapp. Syftet med denna studie är att ta lokala förklaringsmodeller ett steg längre genomatt göra jämförelser av indikatorer för utträde mellan olika användargrupper. Totalt undersöktes tre par av grupper som påvisade skillnader i tre olika variabler. Sedan användes lokala förklaringsmodeller till att beräkna hur viktiga alla globaltfunna indikatorer för utträde var för respektive grupp. Resultaten visade att detinte fanns några signifikanta skillnader mellan grupperna gällande huvudindikatorerna för utträde. Istället visade resultaten skillnader i mindre viktiga indikatorer som hade att göra med den typ av information som lagras av användarna i appen. Förutom att undersöka skillnader i indikatorer för utträde resulterade dennastudie i en välfungerande modell för att prediktera utträde med förmågan attförklara individuella beslut. Random Forest-modellen visade sig vara signifikantbättre än ett antal enklare modeller, med ett AUC-värde på 0.93.

Background: Game analytics is a field that aims to analyze games and help in the enhancement of game development. Data mining is a prominent technique for game analytics. Recent advances in the field of process mining have motivated users to apply process mining to real-world scenarios in order to derive process-oriented insights. In this study, We provide a discussion on how process mining can be used in game analytics. Objective: The goal of this study is to apply process mining to player data from a live game, analyze the results, and determine whether these results can be interpreted, whether we can derive any patterns or insights that can be useful for game designers, and whether process mining can be used in-game analytics and, if so, what kind of versatility it can offer. Also, this study provides approaches on how process mining can be used in player churn prediction and determination of abnormal player activity sequences. Method: Firstly, a literature review is performed to comprehend all of the process mining techniques and metrics used to evaluate the discovered process models. Then experiments are conducted by applying process mining on data from a live game, determine a churn predictor using process mining and determining a technique to identify abnormal player sequences. Results: Process discovery algorithms are applied on data from a live game, the results are analyzed. Several process models are discovered to identify player churn and it is compared with a baseline machine learning churn predictor trained on the same data to that of process mining. Abnormal player activity sequences of the gameare determined using process mining and compared with expected player sequences and analyzed with the help of game designers. Conclusion: Process mining can be utilized in game analytics to discover new process-oriented insights. When compared to typical data mining techniques, the results gained by process mining are more versatile. It also has other capabilities such as detecting unusual sequences in data.

High quality software is a key component of various technology systems that are crucial to software producers, users, and society in general. Software application development today uses software from external sources, to achieve software implementation goals. Numerous methods, activities, and standards have been developed in order to realize quality software. Nevertheless, the pursuit for new methods of realizing and assuring quality in software is incessant. Researchers in the software engineering field are in pursuit of methods that can be on par with changing technology. Assessment of open-source software can be supported by a methodology that uses data from prior releases of a software product to predict the quality of a future release. The proposed methodology is validated using a case study of MPICH ? an open-source software product from the field of high-performance computing. A quantitative model and a module-order model have been developed that can predict the modules that are expected to have code-churn and the amount of code-churn in each module. Code-churn is defined as the amount of update activity that has been done to a software product in order to fix bugs. Further validation of the proposed methodology on other software and development of classification models for the quality factor code-churn are recommended as future work.

No description available.

Nous proposons une nouvelle structure de données distribuée et scalable appelée LH*RSP2P conçue pour les environnements pair à pair(P2P).Les données de l'application forment un fichier d’enregistrements identifiés par les clés primaires. Les enregistrements sont dans des cases mémoires sur des pairs, adressées par le hachage distribué (LH*). Des éclatements créent dynamiquement de nouvelles cases pour accommoder les insertions. L'accès par clé à un enregistrement comporte un seul renvoi au maximum. Le scan du fichier s’effectue au maximum en deux rounds. Ces résultats sont parmi les meilleurs à l'heure actuelle. Tout fichier LH*RSP2P est également protégé contre le Churn. Le calcul de parité protège toute indisponibilité jusqu’à k cases, où k ≥ 1 est un paramètre scalable. Un nouveau type de requêtes, qualifiées de sûres, protège également contre l’accès à toute case périmée. Nous prouvons les propriétés de notre SDDS formellement par une implémentation prototype et des expérimentations. LH*RSP2P apparaît utile aux applications Big Data, sur des RamClouds tout particulièrement / We propose a new scalable and distributed data structure termed LH*RSP2P designed for Peer-to-Peer environment (P2P). Application data forms a file of records identified by primary keys. Records are in buckets on peers, addressed by distributed linear hashing (LH*). Splits create new buckets dynamically, to accommodate inserts. Key access to a record uses at most one hop. Scan of the file proceeds in two rounds at most. These results are among best at present. An LH*RSP2P file is also protected against Churn. Parity calculation recovers from every unavailability of up to k≥1, k is a scalable parameter. A new type of queries, qualified as sure, protects also against access to any out-of-date bucket. We prove the properties of our SDDS formally, by a prototype implementation and experiments. LH*RSP2P appears useful for Big Data manipulations, over RamClouds especially.