Ahmad et al.

J Big Data (2019) 6:28

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-019-0191-6

RESEARCH Open Access

Customer churn prediction in telecom using

machine learning in big data platform
Abdelrahim Kasem Ahmad* , Assef Jafar and Kadan Aljoumaa

*Correspondence:
Abdelrahim.ahmad@hiast. Abstract
edu.sy Customer churn is a major problem and one of the most important concerns for large
Faculty of Information
Technology, Higher Institute companies. Due to the direct effect on the revenues of the companies, especially
for Applied Sciences in the telecom field, companies are seeking to develop means to predict potential
and Technology, Damascus, customer to churn. Therefore, finding factors that increase customer churn is important
Syria
to take necessary actions to reduce this churn. The main contribution of our work is to
develop a churn prediction model which assists telecom operators to predict cus-
tomers who are most likely subject to churn. The model developed in this work uses
machine learning techniques on big data platform and builds a new way of features’
engineering and selection. In order to measure the performance of the model, the
Area Under Curve (AUC) standard measure is adopted, and the AUC value obtained is
93.3%. Another main contribution is to use customer social network in the prediction
model by extracting Social Network Analysis (SNA) features. The use of SNA enhanced
the performance of the model from 84 to 93.3% against AUC standard. The model was
prepared and tested through Spark environment by working on a large dataset created
by transforming big raw data provided by SyriaTel telecom company. The dataset con-
tained all customers’ information over 9 months, and was used to train, test, and evalu-
ate the system at SyriaTel. The model experimented four algorithms: Decision Tree,
Random Forest, Gradient Boosted Machine Tree “GBM” and Extreme Gradient Boosting
“XGBOOST”. However, the best results were obtained by applying XGBOOST algorithm.
This algorithm was used for classification in this churn predictive model.
Keywords: Customer churn prediction, Churn in telecom, Machine learning, Feature
selection, Classification, Mobile Social Network Analysis, Big data

Introduction
The telecommunications sector has become one of the main industries in developed
countries. The technical progress and the increasing number of operators raised the
level of competition [1]. Companies are working hard to survive in this competitive
market depending on multiple strategies. Three main strategies have been proposed
to generate more revenues [2]: (1) acquire new customers, (2) upsell the exist-
ing customers, and (3) increase the retention period of customers. However, com-
paring these strategies taking the value of return on investment (RoI) of each into
account has shown that the third strategy is the most profitable strategy [2], proves
that retaining an existing customer costs much lower than acquiring a new one [3], in
addition to being considered much easier than the upselling strategy [4]. To apply the

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Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 2 of 24

third strategy, companies have to decrease the potential of customer’s churn, known
as “the customer movement from one provider to another” [5].
Customers’ churn is a considerable concern in service sectors with high competi-
tive services. On the other hand, predicting the customers who are likely to leave the
company will represent potentially large additional revenue source if it is done in the
early phase [3].
Many research confirmed that machine learning technology is highly efficient to
predict this situation. This technique is applied through learning from previous data
[6, 7].
The data used in this research contains all customers’ information throughout nine
months before baseline. The volume of this dataset is about 70 Terabyte on HDFS
“Hadoop Distributed File System”, and has different data formats which are structured,
semi-structured, and unstructured. The data also comes very fast and needs a suitable
big data platform to handle it. The dataset is aggregated to extract features for each
customer.
We built the social network of all the customers and calculated features like degree
centrality measures, similarity values, and customer’s network connectivity for each cus-
tomer. SNA features made good enhancement in AUC results and that is due to the con-
tribution of these features in giving more different information about the customers.
We focused on evaluating and analyzing the performance of a set of tree-based
machine learning methods and algorithms for predicting churn in telecommunications
companies. We have experimented a number of algorithms such as Decision Tree, Ran-
dom Forest, Gradient Boost Machine Tree and XGBoost tree to build the predictive
model of customer Churn after developing our data preparation, feature engineering,
and feature selection methods.
There are two telecom companies in Syria which are SyriaTel and MTN. SyriaTel com-
pany was interested in this field of study because acquiring a new customer costs six
times higher than the cost of retaining the customer likely to churn. The dataset pro-
vided by SyriaTel had many challenges, one of them was unbalance challenge, where
the churn customers’ class was very small compared to the active customers’ class. We
experimented three scenarios to deal with the unbalance problem which are oversam-
pling, undersampling and without re-balancing. The evaluation was performed using the
Area under receiver operating characteristic curve “AUC” because it is generic and used
in case of unbalanced datasets [8].
Many previous attempts using the Data Warehouse system to decrease the churn rate
in SyriaTel were applied. The Data Warehouse aggregated some kind of telecom data like
billing data, Calls/SMS/Internet, and complaints. Data Mining techniques were applied
on top of the Data Warehouse system, but the model failed to give high results using this
data. In contrast, the data sources that are huge in size were ignored due to the complex-
ity in dealing with them. The Data Warehouse was not able to acquire, store, and process
that huge amount of data at the same time. In addition, the data sources were from differ-
ent types, and gathering them in Data Warehouse was a very hard process so that adding
new features for Data Mining algorithms required a long time, high processing power,
and more storage capacity. On the other hand, all these difficult processes in Data Ware-
house are done easily using distributed processing provided by big data platform.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 3 of 24

Furthermore, big social networks, as those in SyriaTel, are considered one of the fun-
damental components of big data network graphs [9]. The computational complexity of
SNA measures is very high due to the nature of the iterative calculations done on a big
scale graph, as mentioned in Eqs. (1) and (2). A lot of work to decrease the complexity
of computing SNA measures has been done. For example, Barthelemy [10] proposed a
new algorithm to reduce the complexity of calculating the Betweenness centrality from
O(n3) to O(n2). Elisabetta [11] also proposed an approximation method to compute the
Betweenness with less complexity. In spite of that, the traditional Data Warehouse sys-
tem still suffers from deficiencies in computing the essential SNA measures on large
scale networks.
Big data system allowed SyriaTel Company to collect, store, process, aggregate the data
easily regardless of its volume, variety, and complexity. In addition, it enabled extracting
richer and more diverse features like SNA features that provide additional information
to enhance the churn predictive model.
We believe that big data facilitated the process of feature engineering which is one of
the most difficult and complex processes in building predictive models. By using the
big data platform, we give the power to SyriaTel company to go farther with big data
sources. In addition, the company becomes able to extract the Social Network Analysis
features from a big scale social graph which is built from billions of edges (transactions)
that connect millions of nodes (customers). The hardware and the design of the big data
platform illustrated in “Proposed churn method” section fit the need to compute these
features regardless of their complexity on this big scale graph.
The model also was evaluated using a new dataset and the impact of this system to
the decision to churn was tested. The model gave good results and was deployed to
production.

Related work
Many approaches were applied to predict churn in telecom companies. Most of these
approaches have used machine learning and data mining. The majority of related work
focused on applying only one method of data mining to extract knowledge, and the oth-
ers focused on comparing several strategies to predict churn.
Gavril et al. [12] presented an advanced methodology of data mining to predict churn
for prepaid customers using dataset for call details of 3333 customers with 21 features,
and a dependent churn parameter with two values: Yes/No. Some features include infor-
mation about the number of incoming and outgoing messages and voicemail for each
customer. The author applied principal component analysis algorithm “PCA” to reduce
data dimensions. Three machine learning algorithms were used: Neural Networks, Sup-
port Vector Machine, and Bayes Networks to predict churn factor. The author used AUC
to measure the performance of the algorithms. The AUC values were 99.10%, 99.55%
and 99.70% for Bayes Networks, Neural networks and support vector machine, respec-
tively. The dataset used in this study is small and no missing values existed.
He et al. [13] proposed a model for prediction based on the Neural Network algorithm
in order to solve the problem of customer churn in a large Chinese telecom company
which contains about 5.23 million customers. The prediction accuracy standard was the
overall accuracy rate, and reached 91.1%.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 4 of 24

Idris [14] proposed an approach based on genetic programming with AdaBoost

to model the churn problem in telecommunications. The model was tested on two
standard data sets. One by Orange Telecom and the other by cell2cell, with 89% accu-
racy for the cell2cell dataset and 63% for the other one.
Huang et al. [15] studied the problem of customer churn in the big data platform.
The goal of the researchers was to prove that big data greatly enhance the process of
predicting the churn depending on the volume, variety, and velocity of the data. Deal-
ing with data from the Operation Support department and Business Support depart-
ment at China’s largest telecommunications company needed a big data platform to
engineer the fractures. Random Forest algorithm was used and evaluated using AUC.
Makhtar et al. [16] proposed a model for churn prediction using rough set theory
in telecom. As mentioned in this paper Rough Set classification algorithm outper-
formed the other algorithms like Linear Regression, Decision Tree, and Voted Percep-
tion Neural Network.
Various researches studied the problem of unbalanced data sets where the churned
customer classes are smaller than the active customer classes, as it is a major issue
in churn prediction problem. Amin et al. [17] compared six different sampling tech-
niques for oversampling regarding telecom churn prediction problem. The results
showed that the algorithms (MTDF and rules-generation based on genetic algo-
rithms) outperformed the other compared oversampling algorithms.
Burez and Van den Poel [8] studied the problem of unbalance datasets in churn pre-
diction models and compared performance of Random Sampling, Advanced Under-
Sampling, Gradient Boosting Model, and Weighted Random Forests. They used
(AUC, Lift) metrics to evaluate the model. the result showed that undersampling
technique outperformed the other tested techniques.
We did not find any research interested in this problem recorded in any telecommu-
nication company in Syria. Most of the previous research papers did not perform the
feature engineering phase or build features from raw data while they relied on ready
features provided either by telecom companies or published on the internet.
In this paper, the feature engineering phase is taken into consideration to create our
own features to be used in machine learning algorithms. We prepared the data using
a big data platform and compared the results of four trees based machine learning
algorithms.

Data set
There are many types of data in SyriaTel used to build the churn model. These types
are classified as follow:

1. Customer data It contains all data related to customer’s services and contract infor-
mation. In addition to all offers, packages, and services subscribed to by the cus-
tomer. Furthermore, it also contains information generated from CRM system like
(all customer GSMs, Type of subscription, birthday, gender, the location of living and
more ...).
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 5 of 24

2. Towers and complaints database The information of action location is represented as

digits. Mapping these digits with towers’ database provides the location of this trans-
action, giving the longitude and latitude, sub-area, area, city, and state.
Complaints’ database provides all complaints submitted and statistics inquiries
related to coverage, problems in offers and packages, and any problem related to the
telecom business.
3. Network logs data Contains the internal sessions related to internet, calls, and SMS
for each transaction in Telecom operator, like the time needed to open a session for
the internet and call ending status. It could indicate if the session dropped due to an
error in the internal network.
4. Call details records “CDRs” Contain all charging information about calls, SMS, MMS,
and internet transaction made by customers. This data source is generated as text
files.
5. Mobile IMEI information It contains the brand, model, type of the mobile phone and
if it’s dual or mono SIM device.
This data has a large size and there is a lot of detailed information about it. We spent
a lot of time to understand it and to know its sources and storing format. In addi-
tion to these records, the data must be linked to the detailed data stored in relational
databases that contain detailed information about the customer. The nine months
of data sets contained about ten million customers. The total number of columns is
about ten thousand columns.

Data exploration and challenges with SyriaTel dataset

Spark engine is used to explore the structure of this dataset, it was necessary to make
the exploration phase and make the necessary pre-preparation so that the dataset
becomes suitable for classification algorithms. After exploring the data, we found
that about 50% of all numeric variables contain one or two discrete values, and nearly
80% of all the categorical variables have Less than 10 categories, 15% of the numeri-
cal variables and 33% of the categorical variables have only one value. Most of some
variables’ values are around zero. We found that 77% of the numerical variables have
more than 97% of their values filled with 0 or null value. These results indicate that a
large number of variables can be removed because these variables are fixed or close to
a constant. This dataset encounters many challenges as follow.

Data volume
Since we don’t know the features that could be useful to predict the churn, we had to
work on all the data that reflect the customer behavior in general. We used data sets
related to calls, SMS, MMS, and the internet with all related information like com-
plaints, network data, IMEI, charging, and other. The data contained transactions for
all customers during nine months before the prediction baseline. The size of this data
was more than 70 Terabyte, and we couldn’t perform the needed feature engineering
phase using traditional databases.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 6 of 24

Data variety
The data used in this research is collected from multiple systems and databases. Each
source generates the data in a different type of files as structured, semi-structured
(XML-JSON) or unstructured (CSV-Text). Dealing with these kinds of data types is very
hard without big data platform since we can work on all the previous data types with-
out making any modification or transformation. By using the big data platform, we no
longer have any problem with the size of these data or the format in which the data are
represented.

Unbalanced dataset
The generated dataset was unbalanced since it is a special case of the classification prob-
lem where the distribution of a class is not usually homogeneous with other classes. The
dominant class is called the basic class, and the other is called the secondary class. The
data set is unbalanced if one of its categories is 10% or less compared to the other one [18].
Although machine learning algorithms are usually designed to improve accuracy by
reducing error, not all of them take into account the class balance, and that may give bad
results [18]. In general, classes are considered to be balanced in order to be given the
same importance in training.
We found that SyriaTel dataset was unbalanced since the percentage of the secondary
class that represents churn customers is about 5% of the whole dataset.

Extensive features
The collected data was full of columns, since there is a column for each service, prod-
uct, and offer related to calls, SMS, MMS, and internet, in addition to columns related
to personnel and demographic information. If we need to use all these data sources the
number of columns for each customer before the data being processed will exceed ten
thousand columns.

Missing values
There is a representation of each service and product for each customer. Missing values
may occur because not all customers have the same subscription. Some of them may
have a number of services and others may have something different. In addition, there
are some columns related to system configurations and these columns have only null
value for all customers.

Proposed churn method

In order to build the churn predictive system at SyriaTl, a big data platform must be
installed. Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP)1 was chosen because it is a free and
an open source framework. In addition, it is under the Apache 2.0 License. HDP plat-
form has a variety of open source systems and tools related to big data. These open
source systems and tools are integrated with each other. Figure 1 presents the ecosystem

1
https​://horto​nwork​s.com/.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 7 of 24

Fig. 1 Hortonworks data platform HDP—big data framework

of HDP, where each group of tools is categorized under specific specialization like Data
Management, Data Access, Security, Operations and Governance Integration.
The installation of HDP framework was customized in order to have the only needed
tools and systems that are enough to go through all phases of this work. This custom-
ized package of installed systems and tools is called SYTL-BD framework (SyriaTel’s big
data framework). We installed Hadoop Distributed File System HDFS2 to store the data,
Spark execution engine3 to process the data, Yarn4 to manage the resources, Zeppelin5
as the development user interface, Ambari6 to monitor the system, Ranger7 to secure the
system and (Flume8 System and Scoop9 tool) to acquire the data from outside SYTL-BD
framework into HDFS.
The used hardware resources contained 12 nodes with 32 Gigabyte RAM, 10 Terabyte
storage capacity, and 16 cores processor for each node. A nine consecutive months data-
set was collected. This dataset will be used to extract the features of churn predictive
model. The data life cycle went through several stages as shown in Fig. 2
Spark engine was used in most of the phases of the model like data processing, feature
engineering, training and testing the model since it performs the processing on RAM. In
addition, there are many other advantages. One of these advantages is that this engine
containing a variety of libraries for implementing all stages of machine learning lifecycle.

Data acquisition and storing

Moving the data from outside SYTL-BD into HDFS was the first step of work. The data
is divided into three main types which are structured, semi-structured and unstructured.
Apache Flume is a distributed system used to collect and move the unstructured (CSV
and text) and semi-structured (JSON and XML) data files to HDFS. Figure 3 shows

2
https​://hadoo​p.apach​e.org/docs/r1.2.1/hdfs_desig​n.html.
3
https​://spark​.apach​e.org/.
4
https​://hadoo​p.apach​e.org/docs/curre​nt/hadoo​p-yarn/hadoo​p-yarn-site/YARN.html.
5
https​://zeppe​lin.apach​e.org/.
6
https​://ambar​i.apach​e.org/.
7
https​://range​r.apach​e.org/.
8
https​://flume​.apach​e.org.
9
https​://sqoop​.apach​e.org/.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 8 of 24

Fig. 2 Proposed churn Prediction System Architecture

Fig. 3 Apache Flume configured system architecture

the designed architecture of flume in SYTL-BD. There are three main components in
FLUME. These components are the data Source, the Channel where the data moves and
the Sink where the data is transported.
Flume agents transporting files exist in the defined Spooling Directory Source using
one channel, as configured in SYTL-BD. This channel is defined as Memory Channel
because it performed better than the other channels in FLUME. The data moves across
the channel to be finally written in the sink which is HDFS. The data transformed to
HDFS keep in the same format type as it was.
Apache SQOOP is the distributed tool used to transfer the bulk of data between
HDFS and relational databases (Structured data). This tool was used to transfer all the
data which exists in databases into HDFS by using Map jobs. Figure 4 shows the archi-
tecture of SQOOP import process where four mappers are defined by default. Each Map
job selects part of the data and moves it to HDFS. The data is saved in CSV file type after
being transported by SQOOP to HDFS.
After transporting all the data from its sources into HDFS, it was important to
choose the appropriate file type that gives the best performance in regards to space
utilization and execution time. This experiment was done using spark engine where
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 9 of 24

Fig. 4 Apache SQOOP data import architecture

Data Frame library10 was used to transform 1 terra byte of CSV data into Apache Par-
quet11 file type and Apache Avro12 file type. In addition to that, three compression
scenarios were taken into consideration in this experiment.
Parquet file type was the chosen format type that gave the best results. It is a colum-
nar storage format since it has efficient performance compared with the others, espe-
cially in dealing with feature engineering and data exploration tasks. On the other
hand, using Parquet file type with Snappy Compression technique gave the best space
utilization. Figure 5 shows some comparison between file types.

Feature engineering
The data was processed to convert it from its raw status into features to be used in
machine learning algorithms. This process took the longest time due to the huge
numbers of columns. The first idea was to aggregate values of columns per month
(average, count, sum, max, min ...) for each numerical column per customer, and the
count of distinct values for categorical columns.
Another type of features was calculated based on the social activities of the custom-
ers through SMS and calls. Spark engine is used for both statistical and social fea-
tures, the library used for SNA features is the Graph Frame.

10
https​://spark​.apach​e.org/docs/lates​t/sql-progr​ammin​g-guide​.html.
11
https​://parqu​et.apach​e.org/.
12
https​://avro.apach​e.org/.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 10 of 24

Fig. 5 Differences in space utilization and execution time per file type

• Statistics features These features are generated from all types of CDRs, such as the
average of calls made by the customer per month, the average of upload/down-
load internet access, the number of subscribed packages, the percentage of Radio
Access Type per site in month, the ratio of calls count on SMS count and many
features generated from aggregating data of the CDRs.

Since we have data related to all customers’ actions in the network, we aggre-
gated the data related to Calls, SMS, MMS, and internet usage for each customer
per day, week, and month for each action during the nine months. Therefore, the
number of generated features increased more than three times the number of the
columns. In addition, we entered the features related to complaints submitted
from the customers from all systems. Some features were related to the number of
complaints, the percentage of coverage complaints to the whole complaints sub-
mitted, the average duration between each two complaints sequentially, the dura-
tion in “Hours” to close the complaint, the closure result, and other features.

The features related to IMEI data such as the type of device, the brand, dual or
mono device, and how many devices the customer changed were extracted.

We did many rounds of brainstorming with seniors in the marketing section to

decide what features to create in addition to those mentioned in some researches.
We created many features like percentage of incoming/out-coming calls, SMS,
MMS to the competitors and landlines, binary features to show if customers were
subscribing some services or not, rate of internet usage between 2G, 3G and 4G,
number of devices used each month, number of days being out of coverage, per-
centage of friends related to competitor, and hundred of other features.

Figures 6 and 7 visualize some of the basic categorical and numerical features to
give more insight on the deference between churn and non-churn classes.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 11 of 24

Fig. 6 Distribution of some main categorical features

Fig. 7 Feature distribution for some main numerical features. Panel (a) visualizes the distribution of Day
of Last Outgoing Transaction feature. Panel (b) visualizes the feature distribution of Average Radio Access
Type Between 3G and 2G. Panel (c) also visualizes the distribution of Total Balance feature. Panel (d) shows
the feature distribution of Percentage Transaction with other operators. Similarly, panel (e) visualizes the
distribution of Percentage of Signaling Error/Dropped calls. Finally, panel (f) visualizes the distribution of the
GSM Age feature. The red color is used in all panels to represent the churned customers’ class and the blue
one for active customers’ class

• Social Network Analysis features Data transformation and preparation are per-
formed to summarize the connections between every two customers and build a
social network graph based on CDR data taken for the last 4 months. Graph frame
library on spark is used to accomplish this work. The social network graph con-
sists of Nodes and edges.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 12 of 24

Fig. 8 Visualization for a sample of the Syrian social community

• Nodes: represent GSM number of subscribers.

• Edges: represent interactions between subscribers (Calls, SMS, and MMS). The
graph edges are directed since we have A to B and B to A.

Figure 8 visualizes a sample of the build social network in SyriaTel where the red
nodes are SyriaTel’s customers and the Yellow nodes are MTN’s Customers, the
lines between the nodes express the interaction between the nodes.

The total social graph contained about 15 million nodes that represent SyriaTel,
MTN, and Baseline numbers and more than 2.5 Billion edges.

Graph-based features are extracted from the social graph. The graph is a weighted
directed graph. We built three graphs depending on the used edges’ weight. The weight
of edges is the number of shared events between every two customers. We used three
types of weights: (1) the normalized calling duration between customers, (2) the normal-
ized total number of calls, SMS, and MMS, (3) the mean of the previous two normalized
weights. The normalization process varies according to the algorithm used to extract the
features as we see in the formulas of these algorithms. Based on the directed graphs, we
use PageRank [19], Sender Rank [20] algorithms to produce two features for each graph.

• The weighted Page Rank equation is defined as follows

 Wn→m
PR(m) = (1 − d) + d ∗  PR(n) (1)
Wn→n′
n′ ∈N (n)
n∈N (m)
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 13 of 24

• While the weighted Sender Rank equation is defined as follow

 Wm→n
SR(m) = (1 − d) + d ∗  SR(n) (2)
n∈N (m) n′ ∈N (n) Wn→n′

Graph networks related to telecom data may contain two types of nodes. First, nodes
with zero outgoing and many incoming interactions. Second, nodes with zero-
incoming and many outgoing interactions. These two kinds of nodes are called Sink
nodes.
In regards to Eq. (1), the nodes with zero outgoing edges are the Sinks while in
Eq. (2) the Sinks are the nodes with zero-incoming edges. The damping factor d is
used here to prevent these Sinks from getting higher SR or PR values each round
of calculation. Damping factor in telecom social graph is used to represent the
interaction-through probability .The first part (1-d) represents the chance to ran-
domly select a sink node while the d is used to make sure that the sum of PageR-
anks or SenderRanks is equal to 1 at the end. In addition to that, it prevents the
nodes with zero-outgoing edges to get zero SenderRank values and the nodes with
zero-incoming edges to get zero PageRank values since these values will be passed
to the sink nodes each round. If d =1, the equations need an infinite number of
iterations to reach convergence. While a low d value will make the calculations
easier but will give incorrect results. We assumed to set the d value to be 0.85 as
mentioned in most of the research [21, 22].
N(m) is the list of friends for the customer (m) in his social network. Wn→m is the
directed edge weight from n to m.  ′ Wn→m W ′
is the normalized weight of the
n ∈N (n) n→n
directed edge from n to m. The same description is used for sender rank.
Due to the random walk nature of the Eqs. (1) and (2), PR and SR will be stable
after a number of iterations. These values indicate the importance of the custom-
ers since the higher values of PR(m) and SR(m) corresponds to the higher impor-
tance of customers in the social network.
Other SNA features like the degree of centrality, IN and OUT degree which is the
number of distinct friends in receive and send behavior were calculated.
The feature Neighbor Connectivity based on degree centrality which means the
average connectivity of neighbors for each customer is also calculated [23].
• Neighbor Connectivity equation is defined as follow
  
N (k)
k∈N (m)
NC(m) = (3)
|N (m)|

The local clustering coefficient for each customer is also calculated. This feature tells
us how close the customer’s friends are (number of existing connections in a neigh-
borhood divided by the number of all possible connections) [24].
• local clustering coefficient equation is defined as follow
 
 N (m) ∩ N (k)
LC(m) = (4)
|N (m)| ∗ (|N (m)| − 1)
k∈N (m)
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 14 of 24

This social network is also used to find similar customers in the network based on
mutual friend concept. Each customer has 2 similarity features with the other cus-
tomers in his network, like Jaccard similarity, and Cosine similarity. These calcula-
tions were done for each distinct couple in the social network, where each customer
will have two calculations in the network. To reduce this complexity, customers who
don’t have mutual friends are excluded from these calculations. The highest values
for both measures are selected for each customer ( top Jaccard and Cosine similarity
for similar SyriaTel customer and top Jaccard and Cosine similarity for similar MTN
customer). Jaccard measure: normalize the number of mutual friends based on the
union of the both friends lists, [25].
• Jaccard similarity equation between customer(m) and customer(k) is defined as
follows:
 
N (m) ∩ N (k)
JS(m, k) = 
  (5)
N (m) ∪ N (k)

Another similarity measure is the Cosine measure which is similar to Jaccard’s. On

the other hand, this similarity measure calculates the Cosine of the angle between
every two customers’ vectors where the vector is the friend list of each customer [25].
• Cosine similarity equation between customer(m) and customer(k) is defined as
follows:

 
N (m) ∩ N (k)
JS(m, k) =    (6)
|N (m)|N (k)

The cosign similarity is useful when the customer is in the phase of leaving the com-
pany to the competitor, where he starts building his network on the new GSM line to
be similar to the old being churned, taking into consideration that the new line has a
small friends list compared with the old one.
These features are used for the first time to enhance the prediction of churn, and
they have a positive effect along with the other statistical features. The distribution of
the main SNA features are presented in Fig. 9.
Table 1 shows some calculated main SNA features with illustration.

Features transformation and selection

Some features such as Contract ID, MSISDN and other unique features for all cus-
tomers were removed. They are not used in the training process because they have a
direct correlation with the target output (specific to the customer itself ). We deleted
features with identical values or missing values, deleted duplicated features, and fea-
tures that have few numeric values. We found that more than half of the features have
more than 98% of missing values. We tried to delete all features that have at least one
null value, but this method gave bad results.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 15 of 24

Fig. 9 Distribution of some main SNA features, panel (a) visualizes the feature distribution of Cosine Similarity
Between GSM Operators, panel (b) visualizes the distribution of Local Cluster Coefficient feature, and panel
(c) visualizes the distribution of Social Power Factor feature. The red color is used in all panels to represent the
churned customers’ class and the blue one for active customers’ class

Table 1 Some main SNA features with description

Feature name Feature description

In-Degree Number of friends connecting with the customer

Out-Degree Number of friends the customer connecting with
Max-Cosine-Sim-MTN Maximum Cosine similarity with other operators’ customers
Max-Cosine-Sim-SyriaTel Maximum Cosine similarity with SyriaTel customers
Max-Jaccard-SIM-MTN Maximum Jaccard similarity with other operators’ customers
Max-Jaccard-Sim-SyriaTel Maximum Jaccard similarity with SyriaTel customers
SR Weighted Sender Rank in social graph
PR Weighted Page Rank in social graph
PF “Social Power Factor” Average of weighted Page Rank and Sender Rank in social graph
Betweenness # of short paths between any two people in the social network
passes through this customer node
LLC “Local Cluster Coefficient” How much the customer friends know each other
NC “Neighborhood Connectivity” The number of friends and friends of friends for the customer

Finally, we filled out the missing values with other values derived from either the
same features or other features. This method is preferable so that it enables us to use
the information in most features for the training process. We applied the following:

• Records that contain more than 90% of missing features were deleted.
• Features that have more than 70% of missing values were deleted.
• For the missing categories in categorical features, they were replaced by a new cat-
egory called ‘Other’.
• The missing numerical values were replaced with the average of the feature.
• The number of categorical features were 78, the first 31 most frequent categories
were chosen and the remaining categories were replaced with a new category, so
the total number is 32 categories.
• There are some other features with a numeric character but they contain only a
limited number of duplicate values in more than one record. This indicates that
they are categorical so we have dealt with them as categorical features, but the
experiment shows that they perform worse with the model, so that they have been
deleted.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 16 of 24

Fig. 10 Periods of historical and future data

We have also calculated the correlation between numerical features using Pearson
and removed the correlated features. This removal had no effect on the final result.
Many other methods were tested, but this applied approach gave the best perfor-
mance of the four algorithms. The number of features after this operation exceeded
2000 features at the end.
We need this data labeled for training and testing, we contacted experts from the
marketing section to provide us with labeled sample of GSM, so they provide us with
a prepaid customers in idle phase after 2 months of the nine months data, consid-
ering them as churners. The other non-churned customers were labeled as Active
customers (customers acquired in the last 4 months are excluded). The total count
of the sample where 5 million customers containing 300,000 churned customers and
4,700,000 active customers. Figure 10 shows the periods of historical data and the
future period when the customer may leave the company.
The experts in marketing decided to predict the churn before 2 months of the
actual churn action, in order to have sufficient time for proactive action with these
customers.

Classification
The solution we proposed divided the data into two groups: the training group and the
testing group. The training group consists of 70% of the dataset and aims to train the
algorithms. The test group contains 30% of the dataset and is used to test the algorithms.
The hyperparameters of the algorithms were optimized using K-fold cross-validation.
The value of k was 10. The target class is unbalanced, and this could cause a significant
negative impact on the final models. We dealt with this problem in our research by
rebalancing the sample of training by taking a sample of data to make the two classes
balanced [25]. We started with oversampling by duplicating the churn class to be bal-
anced with the other class. We also used the random undersampling method, which
reduces the sample size of the large class to become balanced with the second class. This
method is the same as the one used in more than one research papers [8, 26]. It gave the
best result for some algorithms. The training sample size became 420,000.
We started training Decision Tree algorithm and optimizing the depth and the
maximum number of nodes hyperparameters. We experimented with several values,
the optimized number of nodes was 398 nodes in the tree and the depth value was 20.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 17 of 24

Random Forest algorithm was also trained, we optimized the number of trees hyper-
parameter. We experimented with building the model by changing the values of this
parameter every time in 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 trees. The best results show that
the best number of trees was 200 trees. Increasing the number of trees after 200 will
not give a significant increase in the performance. GBM algorithm was trained and
tested on the same data, we optimized the number of trees hyper-parameter with val-
ues up to 500 trees. The best value after the experiment was also 200 trees. GBM gave
better results than RF and DT. We finally installed XGBOOST on spark 2.3 frame-
work and integrated it with ML library in spark and applied the same steps with the
past three algorithms. We also optimized the number of trees, and the best value after
multiple experiments was 180 trees.

Results and discussion

The results were analyzed to compare the performance regarding the different sizes
of training data. Dealing with unbalanced dataset using the three scenarios were also
analyzed. The first main concern was about choosing the appropriate sliding window
for data to extract statistical and SNA features. How much historical data is needed in
features engineering phase?
In Fig. 11, M1 refer to the first month before the baseline and M9 refer to the ninth
month before baseline. The features of month N are aggregated from the N-month
sliding data window (from month 1 to month N). As Fig. 11a presents, we can con-
firm that increasing the volume of training data to get statistical features increases
the performance of the classification algorithms. However, the addition of the oldest
three months did not provide any enhancement on model performance. When only
using statistical features, the highest value of AUC reached 84%.
The Social Network Analysis features had a different scenario, when the best sliding
window to build the social graph and extract appropriate SNA features was during the
last four months before the baseline, as shown in Fig. 11b. Adding more old data will
adversely affect the performance of the model. The highest AUC value reached by
using only SNA features was 75.3%.
Depending on the above two different scenarios, the last 6 months of the raw dataset
was used to extract the statistical features, while the last four months of that dataset was

Fig. 11 Performance of classification algorithms per sliding window and feature type. Panel (a) shows the
improvement of churn predictive model using Statistical Features related to different historical periods, panel
(b) presents the changes in predictive model improvement using SNA Features related to the same historical
periods, and panel (c) presents the enhancement of churn predictive model when using both statistical and
SNA Features
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 18 of 24

Table 2 Comparing AUC results before and after adding SNA to statistical features
Features XGBOOST (%) GSM (B) (%) Random Forest Decision
(%) Tree (%)

Statistical features 84 82 79.1 76

SNA features 75.3 71 69 67.2
Statistical and SNA features 93.3 90.89 87.76 83

only used to extract the SNA features. Figure 10 presents the best sliding window to
extract SNA features in orange and the blue one is for statistical features while the red
line represents the baseline.
By adding SNA features with the statistical features to the classification algorithms, the
results increased significantly. As presented in Table 2 and Fig. 11c, the addition of both
types of features made a good enhancement to the performance of the churn predictive
model, where the max reached value of AUC was 93.3%.
The second concern taken into consideration was the problem of the unbalanced
dataset since three experiments were applied for all classification algorithms. These
experiments are: (1) classification with undersampling technique, (2) classification
with oversampling technique, (3) classification without balancing the dataset. Table 3
shows that both XGBOOST and GBM algorithms gave the best performance without
any rebalancing techniques, while Random Forest and Decision Tree algorithms gave a
higher performance by using undersampling techniques.
As displayed in Fig. 11 and depending on Tables 2 and 3, we confirm that XGBOOST
algorithm outperformed the rest of the tested algorithms with an AUC value of 93.3%
so that it has been chosen to be the classification algorithm in this proposed predictive
model. GBM algorithm occupied second place with an AUC value of 90.89% while Ran-
dom Forest and Decision Trees came last in AUC ranking with values of 87.76% and 83%
sequentially. Figure 12 shows the ROC curves for the four algorithms.
The top important features that contribute to predict the churn were ranked using
Gain measure [27]. The high gain value of the feature means the more important it is
in predicting the churn. The important features according to XGBOOST algorithm are
presented in Fig. 13 before and after merging SNA and statistical features.
As presented in Fig. 13, adding the Social Network Analysis features changed the
ranking of the important features. The MTN Cosine similarity was the most important
feature since the customers with higher MTN Cosine similarity are more likely to churn

Table 3 Comparing the AUC results of Machine Learning algorithms with each balancing
technique
Technique used XGBOOST (%) GSM (B) (%) Random Forest Decision
for unbalanced dataset (%) Tree (%)

Oversampling 92 90.01 84.2 76.25

Undersampling 93.12 90.21 87.76 83
Without balancing 93.3 90.89 78.47 72.2
As shown in the table each Machine Learning algorithm experimented with three different scenarios with regards to the
problem of the unbalanced dataset. The best results of AUC presented in italics indicate the best technique that fits each
algorithm
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 19 of 24

DT AUC 83 % RF AUC 87.76%

1.0 1.0

0.9

0.8 0.8

0.7
True Pos. Rate

True Pos. Rate

0.6 0.6

0.5

0.4 0.4

0.3

0.2 0.2

0.1
0.0 0.0
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0
False Pos. Rate False Pos. Rate

GBM AUC 90.8% XGBOOST AUC %93.3

1.0

0.9

0.8

0.7
True Pos. Rate

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0.0
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0

False Pos. Rate

Fig. 12 Receiver operating characteristic curve for each classification algorithm

regardless of the other features like balance, internet usage, and in/out calls. Figure 9a
displays the distribution of this feature
By analyzing this feature, most of the customers generally stayed active for a period
of time before terminating or stopping the use of their GSMs. This case probably hap-
pens because the customer needs to make sure that most of his important incoming
calls and contacts have moved to the new line. In other words, the customer could wait
for a period of time to make sure that most of his important people have known the
new GSM number. This case also could be justified as the customer need to finish the
remaining balance in the GSM before he stops using it. Figure 14 shows an example of a
tracked churned customer. this figure presents the phases of moving his community to
the other operator’s GSM.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 20 of 24

Fig. 13 Important features per type according to XGBOOST, panel (a) shows the ranking of important
Statistical features, panel (b) shows the ranking of important Social Network Analysis features, while panel (c)
shows how adding both Statistical and SNA features re-ranks their importance in XGBOOST algorithm. The
orange color is used in all panels to represent the Statistical features and the blue one for SNA features

Fig. 14 Tracked churned customer with Max Cosine MTN Similarity values per week

The customer bought GSM from the competitor in week 7 and terminated SyriaTel’s
GSM in week 14 before being out of coverage in week 13 and week 14. The result of the
Cosine similarity is also displayed in the same figure.
The second important feature is Days of Last Outgoing transaction. As shown in
Fig. 7a, most churners stay longer period than non-churners without making any
transaction.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 21 of 24

The third important feature is total balance since most churners had low balance com-
pared with the active customers regardless of the reason of churn, Fig. 7c shows the dis-
tribution of total balance feature for churners and non-churners customers.
The fourth feature in importance is Average of Radio Access Type where most of the
churners had more 2G internet sessions than 3G sessions, as the speed and quality of 2G
internet sessions is much less than these of 3G sessions. Figure 7b shows the distribu-
tion of this feature where the Average RAT is lower for most of the churners compared
with that of non-churners. The customers are more likely to churn if they are heavy
internet users and there is a better 3G coverage provided by the competitor. By analyz-
ing this feature, 68% of churners are internet users, 65% of them have low Average Radio
Access Type value.
Local Cluster Coefficient is another SNA feature, it’s ranked fifth in importance to
predict the churn since the customers with very low LCC value as shown in Fig. 9b are
less likely to churn. This could be justified because some customers are using these per-
sonal GSMs for business objectives. They need to preserve their numbers in order not to
lose any of their customers. Most of these customers have more than two GSMs. They
communicate with lots of people, most of these people don’t know each other (there is
no interaction between them). A sample of customers with very low LCC were contacted
to check this case. The results show that most of them were related to Cafes, Restau-
rants, Shaving shops, Hairdressers, Libraries, Game Shops, Medical clinics, and others.
The sixth important feature is the Percentage of Transactions to/from other Opera-
tor, this value becomes bigger for churners. The explanation here relies on the effect
of friends on the churn decision, since the affiliation of most of customer’s friends to
the other operator may be evidence of the good reputation or the strong existence of
the competing company in that region or community. Therefore, this can result in the
customer being influenced by the surrounding environment, so he moves to the com-
peting company. The higher value of this feature may increase the likelihood of churn,
Fig. 7d displays the distribution of this feature.
Other features like Customer age is also ranked at the seventh place in importance
since the customers who are less than 32 years old have more likelihood to churn than
the others. This can be explained by the fact that young people are always looking
for the best to meet their needs in better, higher quality, and less expensive services
as the volume of communication, the use of Internet, and other services are much
higher compared to services of customers of different ages. Figure 6 shows the distri-
bution of this feature regarding the churn class. The social power factor feature is the
third SNA feature that is considered one of the top important features to predict the
churn. As presented in Fig. 9c the higher power factor value means the less likely to
churn. As also shown in Fig. 7e, the customers with high Signal Errors and dropped
calls are most likely to churn.
Depending on what was mentioned previously and as shown in Figs. 11c, 12c, we
belive that Social Network Analysis features have a good contribution to increase the
performance of churn prediction model, since they gave a different insight to the cus-
tomer from the social point of view.
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 22 of 24

Table 4 AUC results for classification algorithms on “NotOffered” dataset

Algorithm XGBOOST GSM (B) Random Forest Decision Tree

SyriaTel New Data “NotOffered” 89% 85.5% 83.4% 79.1%

• System evaluation We evaluated the system by using new up to date dataset. The test
was conducted on all prepaid SyriaTel customers without any exception. The pop-
ulation was 7.5 million customers without knowing what their status will be after
2 months. The same models were tested on this data set after being processed as
mentioned previously. The dataset for customers who are most likely predicted to
churn, was divided into two datasets (Offered, NotOffered). Marketing experts make
a proactive action to retain the customers who are predicted to leave SyriaTel from
the offered dataset, and the other dataset “NotOffered” left without any action. The
results of the test were compared with the customer’s status after two months for
the two datasets. The results were very good and the best AUC value was 89% for
XGBOOST on “NotOffered” and most of the cases were predicted right. Table 4
shows AUC results for the four algorithms on the “NotOffered” dataset.

The percentage of the retained customers from Offered dataset was about 47%
from all customers predicted to churn. In other words, about half of the custom-
ers changed their mind regarding churn decision when they got a good offer. This
result was very good for the company, increased the revenue and decreased the
churn rate by about 1.5%.

Conclusion
The importance of this type of research in the telecom market is to help companies
make more profit. It has become known that predicting churn is one of the most
important sources of income to telecom companies. Hence, this research aimed to
build a system that predicts the churn of customers in SyriaTel telecom company.
These prediction models need to achieve high AUC values. To test and train the
model, the sample data is divided into 70% for training and 30% for testing. We chose
to perform cross-validation with 10-folds for validation and hyperparameter opti-
mization. We have applied feature engineering, effective feature transformation and
selection approach to make the features ready for machine learning algorithms. In
addition, we encountered another problem: the data was not balanced. Only about 5%
of the entries represent customers’ churn. This problem was solved by undersampling
or using trees algorithms not affected by this problem. Four tree based algorithms
were chosen because of their diversity and applicability in this type of predic-
tion. These algorithms are Decision Tree, Random Forest, GBM tree algorithm, and
XGBOOST algorithm. The method of preparation and selection of features and enter-
ing the mobile social network features had the biggest impact on the success of this
model, since the value of AUC in SyriaTel reached 93.301%. XGBOOST tree model
achieved the best results in all measurements. The AUC value was 93.301%. The GBM
algorithm comes in the second place and the random forest and Decision Tree came
Ahmad et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:28 Page 23 of 24

third and fourth regarding AUC values. We have evaluated the models by fitting a new
dataset related to different periods and without any proactive action from marketing,
XGBOOST also gave the best result with 89% AUC. The decrease in result could be
due to the non-stationary data model phenomenon, so the model needs training each
period of time.
The use of the Social Network Analysis features enhance the results of predicting the
churn in telecom.

Abbreviations
CDR: call detail record; CRM: customer relationship management; SMS: short message service; HDFS: Hadoop Distributed
File System; XGBoost: Extreme Gradient Boosting; RF: Random Forest; DT: Decision Tree; AUC​: Area Under the Curve; GSM:
global system for mobile communications; IMEI: International Mobile Equipment Identity; SNA: Social Network Analysis;
GBM: Gradient Boosted Machine; ROI: return on investment; ROC: receiver operating characteristic; PCA: principal
component analysis; RAM: random access memory; MMS: multimedia messaging service; CSV: comma-separated values;
JSON: javascript object notation; XML: extensible markup language.

Authors’ contributions
AKA took the role of performing the literature review, building the big data platform, working on the proposed churn
model. he conducted the experiments and wrote the manuscript. AJ and KJ took on a supervisory role and oversaw the
completion of the work. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to SyriaTel, Mrs. CEO Majda Sakr, Mr. Murid Atassi, and Mr. Adham Troudi for support and motivation. Thanks
for Mr. Mhd Assaf, Mr. Nour Almulhem, Mr.william Soulaiman, Mr. Ammar Asaad, Mr. Soulaiman Moualla, Mr. Ahmad Ali,
and Miss. Marwa Hanhoun for their co-operation and help. Thanks to Mr. Kasem Jamil Ahmad and Mr. Fahmi Ammareen
for reviewing the final version of this paper.

Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Availability of data and materials

The data is not available to public because of the restriction applied on it from SyriaTel Telcom company, since the
license was granted for this study. The data is available to researchers in SyriaTel Company and will be available for
others after getting the permission from the company.

Consent for publication

The authors consent for publication.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

All authors give ethics approval and consent to participate in submission and review process.

Funding
The authors declare that they have no funding.

Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Received: 30 December 2018 Accepted: 8 March 2019

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