聚类分析在电信行业客户关系管理中的应用

客户关系管理在电信行业被广泛应用,它已经成为电信运营商增加收入和利润,提高客户满意度、忠诚度的有效工具。聚类分析是数据挖掘的一种重要方法,将它应用在客户关系管理中,可以改善客户关系,并对将来的趋势和行为进行预测。本文采用k-means聚类算法对电信客户数据进行聚类分析,得到具有不同特征的客户群组,对不同群组采取不同的经营策略,帮助管理者提供了合理的决策支持。     

A new marketing strategy map for direct marketing

Direct marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods with an aim to maximize the customer’s lifetime value. Many cost-sensitive learning methods which identify valuable customers to maximize expected profit have been proposed. However, current cost-sensitive methods for profit maximization do not identify how to control the defection probability while maximizing total profits over the customer’s lifetime. Unfortunately, optimal marketing actions to maximize profits often perform poorly in minimizing the defection probability due to a conflict between these two objectives. In this paper, we propose the sequential decision making method for profit maximization under the given defection probability in direct marketing. We adopt a Reinforcement Learning algorithm to determine the sequential optimal marketing actions. With this finding, we design a marketing strategy map which helps a marketing manager identify sequential optimal campaigns and the shortest paths toward desirable states. Ultimately, this strategy leads to the ideal design for more effective campaigns.     

GHIC: a hierarchical pattern-based clustering algorithm for grouping Web transactions

Grouping customer transactions into segments may help understand customers better. The marketing literature has concentrated on identifying important segmentation variables (e.g., customer loyalty) and on using cluster analysis and mixture models for segmentation. The data mining literature has provided various clustering algorithms for segmentation without focusing specifically on clustering customer transactions. Building on the notion that observable customer transactions are generated by latent behavioral traits, in this paper, we investigate using a pattern-based clustering approach to grouping customer transactions. We define an objective function that we maximize in order to achieve a good clustering of customer transactions and present an algorithm, GHIC, that groups customer transactions such that itemsets generated from each cluster, while similar to each other, are different from ones generated from others. We present experimental results from user-centric Web usage data that demonstrates that GHIC generates a highly effective clustering of transactions.     

A recommender system to avoid customer churn: A case study

A major concern for modern enterprises is to promote customer value, loyalty and contribution through services such as can help establish a long-term, honest relationship with customers. For purposes of better customer relationship management, data mining technology is commonly used to analyze large quantities of data about customer bargains, purchase preferences, customer churn, etc. This paper aims to propose a recommender system for wireless network companies to understand and avoid customer churn. To ensure the accuracy of the analysis, we use the decision tree algorithm to analyze data of over 60,000 transactions and of more than 4000 members, over a period of three months. The data of the first nine weeks is used as the training data, and that of the last month as the testing data. The results of the experiment are found to be very useful for making strategy recommendations to avoid customer churn.     

A Data Mining Approach for Retailing Bank Customer Attrition Analysis

Deregulation within the financial service industries and the widespread acceptance of new technologies is increasing competition in the finance marketplace. Central to the business strategy of every financial service company is the ability to retain existing customers and reach new prospective customers. Data mining is adopted to play an important role in these efforts. In this paper, we present a data mining approach for analyzing retailing bank customer attrition. We discuss the challenging issues such as highly skewed data, time series data unrolling, leaker field detection etc, and the procedure of a data mining project for the attrition analysis for retailing bank customers. We use lift as a proper measure for attrition analysis and compare the lift of data mining models of decision tree, boosted naïve Bayesian network, selective Bayesian network, neural network and the ensemble of classifiers of the above methods. Some interesting findings are reported. Our research work demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of data mining in attrition analysis for retailing bank.     

基于关系图提取算法的烟草销售客户关系管理的应用研究

展望客户关系管理,数据挖掘技术在其中起到了至关重要的作用,它可以挖掘出千万数据中的有用信息,企业才能对客户进行各类价值分类,然后预测客户的行为,从而做出正确有效的决策。在CRM应用中,基于数据挖掘技术的基础上,结合CRM系统的不足,为避免或减少客户管理系统因管理不到位而导致客户的流失,造成企业的损失,提出了客户关系图的提取算法,很好地分析了数据挖掘技术在CRM中的应用。     

The Effects of Customer Value on Loyalty and Profits in a Dynamic Competitive Market

Providing high value products and services to customers normally leads to customer loyalty and profits. In practice, the relationship of customer value, loyalty, and profits can be observed in the market. However, the dynamic interactive relationships which lead to customer loyalty and profits still remain ambiguous. In this paper, the Agent-Based Computational Economics (ACE) model is introduced to explore the formation of customer loyalty in the Taiwanese imported lumber market. Using agents with reinforced learning algorithms in trading simulations, the effects of customer value on loyalty and profit are incorporated and examined in this interactive dynamic model. As results, the positive correlations among variables of customer value, loyalty, and profits are observed. A controlled experiment shows that changing customer value leads to changes in customer loyalty and profits, but price is not the determinant factor for improving customer loyalty. The R ² values of customer loyalty and profits elucidate that they are increasing as the time lapsed elongate. Providing high value of products and services is a better strategy for suppliers to attract potential loyal customers.      

A combined mining-based framework for predicting telecommunications customer payment behaviors

Most existing data mining algorithms apply data-driven data mining technologies. The major disadvantage of this method is that expert analysis is required before the derived information can be used. In this paper, we thus adopt a domain-driven data mining strategy and utilize association rules, clustering, and decision trees to analyze the data from fixed-line users for establishing a late payment prediction system, namely the Combined Mining-based Customer Payment Behavior Predication System (CM-CoP). The CM-CoP could indicate potential users who may not pay the fee on time. In the implementation of the proposed system, first association rules were used to analyze customer payment behavior and the results of analysis were used to generate derivative attributes. Next, the clustering algorithm was used for customer segmentation. The cluster of customers who paid their bills was found and was then deleted to reduce data imbalances. Finally, a decision tree was utilized to predict and analyze the rest of the data using the derivative attributes and the attributes provided by the telecom providers. In the evaluation results, the average accuracy of the CM-CoP model was 78.53% under an average recall of 88.13% and an average gain of 11.2% after a six-month validation. Since the prediction accuracy of the existing method used by telecom providers was 65.60%, the prediction accuracy of the proposed model was 13% greater. In other words, the results indicate that the CM-CoP model is effective, and is better than that of the existing approach used in the telecom providers.     

基于WEKA的客户分类信息系统研究

本文采用决策树方法,对客户交易数据和客户基本信息进行数据挖掘分析,降低了数据冗余度,提高了数据集准确率。在RFM模型基础上,从客户交易信息中选取了购买频率和平均每次购买金额作为分类评估指标的补充,得到一组客户交易数据训练集。结合J48算法使用WEKA算法对客户交易数据训练集进行训练、测试和验证,构建了客户分类决策模型,从而有利于客户分类原型系统的系统分析和系统设计。     

Pattern filtering and classification for market basket analysis with profit‐based measures

Market basket analysis is one of the typical applications in mining association rules. The valuable information discovered from data mining can be used to support decision making. Generally, support and confidence (objective) measures are used to evaluate the interestingness of association rules. However, in some cases, by using these two measures, the discovered rules may be not profitable and not actionable (not interesting) to enterprises. Therefore, how to discover the patterns by considering both objective measures (e.g. probability) and subjective measures (e.g. profit) is a challenge in data mining, particularly in marketing applications. This paper focuses on pattern evaluation in the process of knowledge discovery by using the concept of profit mining. Data Envelopment Analysis is utilized to calculate the efficiency of discovered association rules with multiple objective and subjective measures. After evaluating the efficiency of association rules, they are categorized into two classes, relatively efficient (interesting) and relatively inefficient (uninteresting). To classify these two classes, Decision Tree (DT)‐based classifier is built by using the attributes of association rules. The DT classifier can be used to find out the characteristics of interesting association rules, and to classify the unknown (new) association rules.     

Mining non-redundant sequential rules with dynamic bit vectors and pruning techniques

Most algorithms for mining sequential rules focus on generating all sequential rules. These algorithms produce an enormous number of redundant rules, making mining inefficient in intelligent systems. In order to solve this problem, the mining of non-redundant sequential rules was recently introduced. Most algorithms for mining such rules depend on patterns obtained from existing frequent sequence mining algorithms. Several steps are required to organize the data structure of these sequences before rules can be generated. This process requires a great deal of time and memory. The present study proposes a technique for mining non-redundant sequential rules directly from sequence databases. The proposed method uses a dynamic bit vector data structure and adopts a prefix tree in the mining process. In addition, some pruning techniques are used to remove unpromising candidates early in the mining process. Experimental results show the efficiency of the algorithm in terms of runtime and memory usage.     

An efficient approach for the maintenance of user behaviours

Mining sequential patterns is to discover sequential purchasing behaviours for most of the customers from a large number of customer transactions. The strategy of mining sequential patterns focuses on discovering frequent sequences. A frequent sequence is an ordered list of the itemsets purchased by a sufficient number of customers. The previous approaches for mining sequential patterns need to repeatedly scan the database so that they take a large amount of computation time to find frequent sequences. The customer transactions will grow rapidly in a short time, and some of the customer transactions may be antiquated. Consequently, the frequent sequences may be changed due to the insertion of new customer transactions or the deletion of old customer transactions from the database. It may require rediscovering all the patterns by scanning the entire updated customer transaction database. In this paper, we propose an incremental updating technique to maintain the discovered sequential patterns when transactions are inserted into or deleted from the database. Our approach partitions the database into some segments and scans the database segment by segment. For each segment scan, our approach prunes those sequences that cannot be frequent sequences any more to accelerate the finding process of the frequent sequences. Therefore, the number of database scans can be significantly reduced by our approach. The experimental results show that our algorithms are more efficient than other algorithms for the maintenance of mining sequential patterns.     

支持向量机在银行贷款客户分类中的应用研究

随着客户关系管理系统的不断发展和应用,使用先进的算法进行客户分析变得越来越重要。尤其是象银行这种以客户为导向的行业,客户分析是十分必要的。当前,支持向量机方法作为一种统计学习理论的分类方法已经发展的比较成熟而且成功应用到了很多领域。文章解决的主要问题是对银行的客户数据根据其属性对客户进行分类,为银行的客户关系管理系统提供一种可靠的分类方法。文中主要介绍了银行的客户分类学习的过程和结果,如,客户数据清洗,数据预处理,SVM进行数据分类,多类分类处理,客户属性选择等问题。     

User preference mining techniques for personalized applications

Advanced personalized e-applications require comprehensive knowledge about their users’ likes and dislikes in order to provide individual product recommendations, personal customer advice, and custom-tailored product offers. In our approach we model such preferences as strict partial orders with “A is better than B” semantics, which has been proven to be very suitable in various e-applications. In this paper we present preference mining techniques for detecting strict partial order preferences in user log data. Real-life e-applications like online shops or financial services usually have large log data sets containing the transactions of their customers. Since the preference miner uses sophisticated SQL operations to execute all data intensive operations on database layer, our algorithms scale well even for such large log data sets. With preference mining personalized e-applications can gain valuable knowledge about their customers’ preferences, which can be applied for personalized product recommendations, individual customer service, or one-to-one marketing.     

基于贝叶斯分类算法的客户流失分析模型研究

客户关系管理以客户为中心,通过再造企业组织体系和优化业务流程,展开系统的客户研究,最大程度地改善、提高了整个客户关系生命周期的绩效,从而提高客户的满意度和忠诚度,提高运营效率和利润收益。该文研究和探讨了客户关系管理系统开发的技术环节及实现过程,并对基于贝叶斯分类算法的客户流失分析模型的建立进行了分析。     

Analyzing customer behavior from shopping path data using operation edit distance

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been successfully applied to gather customers’ shopping habits from their motion paths and other behavioral data. The customers’ behavioral data can be used for marketing purposes, such as improving the store layout or optimizing targeted promotions to specific customers. Some data mining techniques, such as clustering algorithms can be used to discover customers’ hidden behaviors from their shopping paths. However, shopping path data has peculiar challenges, including variable length, sequential data, and the need for a special distance measure. Due to these challenges, traditional clustering algorithms cannot be applied to shopping path data. In this paper, we analyze customer behavior from their shopping path data by using a clustering algorithm. We propose a new distance measure for shopping path data, called the Operation edit distance, to solve the aforementioned problems. The proposed distance method enables the RFID customer shopping path data to be processed effectively using clustering algorithms. We have collected a real-world shopping path data from a retail store and applied our method to the dataset. The proposed method effectively determined customers’ shopping patterns from the data.     

A dynamic understanding of customer behavior processes based on clustering and sequence mining

In this paper, a novel approach towards enabling the exploratory understanding of the dynamics inherent in the capture of customers’ data at different points in time is outlined. The proposed methodology combines state-of-art data mining clustering techniques with a tuned sequence mining method to discover prominent customer behavior trajectories in data bases, which — when combined — represent the “behavior process” as it is followed by particular groups of customers. The framework is applied to a real-life case of an event organizer; it is shown how behavior trajectories can help to explain consumer decisions and to improve business processes that are influenced by customer actions.     

Customer satisfaction‐aware scheduling for utility maximization on geo‐distributed data centers

With the increasingly growing amount of service requests from the world‐wide customers, the cloud systems are capable of providing services while meeting the customers' satisfaction. Recently, to achieve the better reliability and performance, the cloud systems have been largely depending on the geographically distributed data centers. Nevertheless, the dollar cost of service placement by service providers (SP) differ from the multiple regions. Accordingly, it is crucial to design a request dispatching and resource allocation algorithm to maximize net profit. The existing algorithms are either built upon energy‐efficient schemes alone, or multi‐type requests and customer satisfaction oblivious. They cannot be applied to multi‐type requests and customer satisfaction‐aware algorithm design with the objective of maximizing net profit. This paper proposes an ant‐colony optimization‐based algorithm for maximizing SP's net profit (AMP) on geographically distributed data centers with the consideration of customer satisfaction. First, using model of customer satisfaction, we formulate the utility (or net profit) maximization issue as an optimization problem under the constraints of customer satisfaction and data centers. Second, we analyze the complexity of the optimal requests dispatchment problem and rigidly prove that it is an NP‐complete problem. Third, to evaluate the proposed algorithm, we have conducted the comprehensive simulation and compared with the other state‐of‐the‐art algorithms. Also, we extend our work to consider the data center's power usage effectiveness. It has been shown that AMP maximizes SP net profit by dispatching service requests to the proper data centers and generating the appropriate amount of virtual machines to meet customer satisfaction. Moreover, we also demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach when it accommodates the impacts of dynamically arrived heavy workload, various evaporation rate and consideration of power usage effectiveness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Joint optimization of production planning and supplier selection incorporating customer flexibility: an improved genetic approach

Efficient and effective production planning and supplier selection are important decisions for manufacturing industries in a highly competitive supply chain, in particular, when customers are willing to accept products with less desirable product attributes (e.g., color, material) for economic reasons. Yet these two decision making problems have traditionally been studied separately due to their inherent complexity. This paper attempts to solve optimally the challenging joint optimization problem of production planning and supplier selection, considering customer flexibility for a manufacturer producing multiple products to satisfy customers’ demands. This integrated problem has been formulated as a new mixed integer programming model. The objective is to maximize the manufacturer’s total profit subject to various operating constraints of the supply chain. Due to the complexity and non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP)-hard nature of the problem, an improved genetic approach is proposed to locate near-optimal solutions. This approach differs from a canonical genetic algorithm in three aspects, i.e., a new selection method to reduce the chance of premature convergence and two problem-specific repair heuristics to guarantee the feasibility of the solutions. The computational results of applying the proposed approach to solve a set of randomly generated test problems clearly demonstrate its excellent performance.