Role defining using behavior-based clustering in telecommunication network

Understanding the individual behavior has shown to be of paramount importance to the triumph of the telecommunication operators to retain customers, enhance their purchasing capacity, and predict the churn rate. Different behavior patterns can be observed for different groups of users. Hence, there is an interesting problem posted in telecommunication network that how to define the users’ role according to their behavior patterns. Traditionally, user behavior characterization methods generally based on their call detail record (CDR), which are user’s individual features, are not appropriate to identify the role in network. In this paper, we develop a newmethodology for identifying users’ role based on their behaviors in telecommunication network using the social features instead of their individual features. Experiments have tested on synthetic data and large real datasets, and reveal good results on both of them. Finally, the methodology is not only limited to call graphs but also apply to other networks for role defining. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.