Predicting Customer Churn Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract: Churn prediction is used to identify customers that are becoming less loyal and is an important tool for companies that want to stay competitive in a rapidly growing market. In retail, a dynamic definition of churn is needed to identify churners correctly. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the monetary value of a customer relationship. No change in CLV for a given customer indicates a decrease in loyalty. This thesis proposes a novel approach to churn prediction. The proposed model uses a Recurrent Neural Network to identify churners based on Customer Lifetime Value time series regression. The results show that the model performs better than random. This thesis also investigated the use of the K-means algorithm as a replacement to a rule-extraction algorithm. The K-means algorithm contributed to a more comprehensive analytical context regarding the churn prediction of the proposed model.