Clique PhD Student Donal McGowan wins Best Paper Award @ AICS 2011

After an intense deliberation by the chairs of the sessions due to the high quality of the papers presented at the conference, the best paper award (comprising an iPad2 kindly sponsored by Metralab) was granted to Clique PhD student Mr Donal McGowan of University College Dublin, for his outstanding performance presenting the paper "Churn Prediction in Mobile Telecommunications".

The paper was jointly written with Clique's Industry Partners Idiro Technologies.

Paper Abstract: In telecommunications network analytics, a problem of significant interest to service providers is churn prediction, that is, the identification of customers who have a high probability of leaving the network in the near future. From a business perspective, it is understood that it is more beneficial financially to retain a customer rather than acquiring a new one. It is understood that churn exhibits a viral component, in the sense that if one customer churns, friends in his immediate social network are likely to also churn. This paper presents an evaluation of supervised machine learning classification algorithms applied to the problem of churn prediction. A number of classifiers including regression, boosting and dimension reduction techniques are examined. We find that generalised linear models perform the best and that feature selection can provide better performance on a reduced feature set, thereby increasing the efficiency and accuracy of the classification.

AISC 2011: http://isrc.ulster.ac.uk/aics2011/