An application of support vector machines for customer churn analysis: Credit card case

This study investigates the effectiveness of support vector machines (SVM) approach in detecting the underlying data pattern for the credit card customer churn analysis. This article introduces a relatively new machine learning technique, SVM, to the customer churning problem in attempt to provide a model with better prediction accuracy. To compare the performance of the proposed model, we used a widely adopted and applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) method, back-propagation neural networks (BPN) as a benchmark. The results demonstrate that SVM outperforms BPN. We also examine the effect of the variability in performance with respect to various values of parameters in SVM.