Response modeling with support vector regression

Response modeling has become a key factor to direct marketing. In general, there are two stages in response modeling. The first stage is to identify respondents from a customer database while the second stage is to estimate purchase amounts of the respondents. This paper focuses on the second stage where a regression, not a classification, problem is solved. Recently, several non-linear models based on machine learning such as support vector machines (SVM) have been applied to response modeling. However, there is a major difficulty. A typical training dataset for response modeling is so large that modeling takes very long, or, even worse, modeling may be impossible. Therefore, sampling methods have been usually employed in practice. However a sampled dataset usually leads to lower accuracy. In this paper, we employed an ε-tube based sampling for support vector regression (SVR) which leads to better accuracy than the random sampling method.