Benchmarking sampling techniques for imbalance learning in churn prediction

Class imbalance presents significant challenges to customer churn prediction. Many data-level sampling solutions have been developed to deal with this issue. In this paper, we comprehensively compare the performance of several state-of-the-art sampling techniques in the context of churn prediction. A recently developed maximum profit criterion is used as one of the main performance measures to offer more insights from the perspective of cost–benefit. The experimental results show that the impact of sampling methods depends on the used evaluation metric and that the impact pattern is interrelated with the classifiers. An in-depth exploration of the reaction patterns is conducted, and suitable sampling strategies are recommended for each situation. Furthermore, we also discuss the setting of the sampling rate in the empirical comparison. Our findings will offer a useful guideline for the use of sampling methods in the context of churn prediction.