in order to survive and sustain the competitive advantage in the competitive markets, many organizations have turned to relationship marketing by focusing on maximizing the life time value of their customers and churn management. in fact, more and more companies do realize that their most precious asset is the existing customer base. customer retention is a valuable strategy to ensure long term...

We present results from a large-scale empirical comparison between ten learning methods: SVMs, neural nets, logistic regression, naive bayes, memory-based learning, random forests, decision trees, bagged trees, boosted trees, and boosted stumps. We evaluate the methods on binary classification problems using nine performance criteria: accuracy, squared error, cross-entropy, ROC Area, F-score, p...

Accurate prediction and explanation are fundamental objectives of statistical analysis, yet they seldom coincide. Boosted trees are a statistical learning method that attains both of these objectives for regression and classification analyses. They can deal with many types of response variables (numeric, categorical, and censored), loss functions (Gaussian, binomial, Poisson, and robust), and p...

Tree ensembles such as random forests and boosted trees are accurate but difficult to understand, debug and deploy. In this work, we provide the inTrees (interpretable trees) framework that extracts, measures, prunes and selects rules from a tree ensemble, and calculates frequent variable interactions. An rule-based learner, referred to as the simplified tree ensemble learner (STEL), can also b...

In the medical field, many outcome variables are dichotomized, and the two possible values of a dichotomized variable are referred to as classes. A dichotomized dataset is class-imbalanced if it consists mostly of one class, and performance of common classification models on this type of dataset tends to be suboptimal. To tackle such a problem, resampling methods, including oversampling and und...

Decision tree learning is one of the most popular classification techniques. However, by its nature it is a greedy approach to finding a classification hypothesis that optimizes some information-based criterion. It is very fast but may lead to finding suboptimal classification hypotheses. Moreover, in spite of decision trees being easily interpretable, ensembles of trees (random forests and gra...

Nowadays decision tree learning is one of the most popular classification and regression techniques. Though decision trees are not accurate on their own, they make very good base learners for advanced tree-based methods such as random forests and gradient boosted trees. However, applying ensembles of trees deteriorates interpretability of the final model. Another problem is that decision tree l...