Abstract
Models of customer churn are based on historical data and are used to predict the probability that a client switches to another company. We address customer retention in insurance. Rather than concentrating on those customers with high probability of leaving, we propose a new procedure that can be used to identify the target customers who are likely to respond positively to a retention activity. Our approach is based on random forests and can be useful to anticipate the success of marketing actions aimed at reducing customer attrition. We also discuss the type of insurance portfolio database that can be used for this purpose.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Kotler, P.: Marketing during periods of shortage. J. Marketing 38(3), 20–29 (1974)
Kamakura, W.A., Ramaswami, S., Srivastava, R.: Applying latent trait analysis in the evaluation of prospects for cross-selling of financial services. Int. J. Res. Mark. 8, 329–349 (1991)
Seng, J.-L., Chen, T.C.: An analytical approach to select data mining for business decision. Expert Syst. Appl. 37(9), 8042–8057 (2010)
Liao, S.-H., Chen, Y.-J., Hsieh, H.-H.: Mining customer knowledge for direct selling and marketing. Expert Syst. Appl. 38(5), 6059–6069 (2011)
Larivière, B., Van den Poel, D.: Predicting customer retention and profitability by using random forest and regression techniques. Expert Syst. Appl. 29(2), 472–484 (2005)
Hammond, J.D., Houston, D.B., Melander, E.R.: Determinants of household life insurance premium expenditures: an empirical investigation. J. Risk Insur. 34(3), 397–408 (1967)
Duker, J.M.: Expenditures for life insurance among working-wife families. J. Risk Insur. 36(5), 525–533 (1969)
Mayers, D., Smith Jr., C.W.: The interdependence of individual portfolio decisions and the demand for insurance. J. Polit. Econ. 91(2), 304–311 (1983)
Doherty, N.A.: Portfolio efficient insurance buying strategies. J. Risk Insur. 51(2), 205–224 (1984)
Crosby, L.A., Stephens, N.: Effects of relationship marketing on satisfaction, retention, and prices in the life insurance industry. J. Marketing Res. 24(4), 404–411 (1987)
Jackson, D.: Determining a customers lifetime value, part three. Direct Marketing 52(4), 28–30 (1989)
Berger, P.D., Nasr, N.: Customer lifetime value: marketing models and applications. J. Interact. Mark. 12, 17–30 (1998)
Schlesinger, H., Schulenburg, J.M.: Customer information and decisions to switch insurers. J. Risk Insur. 60(4), 591–615 (1993)
Cooley, S.: Loyalty strategy development using applied member-cohort segmentation. J. Consum. Mark. 19(7), 550–563 (2002)
Ryals, L.J., Knox, S.: Measuring risk-adjusted customer lifetime value and its impact on relationship marketing strategies and shareholder value. Eur. J. Marketing 39(5/6), 456–472 (2005)
Brockett, P.L., Golden, L., Guillén, M., Nielsen, J.P., Parner, J., Pérez-Marín, A.M.: Survival analysis of household insurance policies: How much time do you have to stop total customer defection? J. Risk Insur. 75(3), 713–737 (2008)
Guillén, M., Nielsen, J.P., Pérez-Marín, A.M.: The need to monitor customer loyalty and business risk in the European insurance industry. Geneva Pap. R. I. – Iss. P. 33, 207–218 (2008)
Guillén, M., Pérez-Marín, A.M., Alcaniz, M.: A logistic regression approach to estimating customer profit loss due to lapses in insurance. Insurance Markets and Companies: Analyses and Actuarial Computations 2(2), 42–54 (2011)
Guillén, M., Nielsen, J.P., Scheike, T.H., Pérez-Marín, A.M.: Time-varying effects in the analysis of customer loyalty: A case study in insurance. Expert Syst. Appl. 39, 3551–3558 (2012)
Lai, L.-H., Liu, C.T., Lin, J.T.: The moderating effects of switching costs and inertia on the customer satisfaction-retention link: auto liability insurance service in Taiwan. Insurance Markets and Companies: Analyses and Actuarial Computations 2(1), 69–78 (2011)
Neslin, S., Gupta, S., Kamakura, W., Lu, J., Mason, C.: Defection detection: Measuring and understanding the predictive accuracy of customer churn model. J. Marketing Res. 43, 204–211 (2006)
Lemmens, A., Croux, C.: Bagging and boosting classification trees to predict churn. J. Marketing Res. 43, 276–286 (2006)
Coussement, K., Van den Poel, D.: Churn prediction in subscription services: An application of support vector machines while comparing two parameter-selection techniques. Expert Syst. Appl. 34, 313–327 (2008)
Hansotia, B., Rukstales, B.: Incremental value modeling. J. Interact. Mark. 16(3), 35–46 (2002)
Lo, V.: The true lift model. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 4(2), 78–86 (2002)
Larsen, K.: Net models. In: M2009 - Annual SAS Data Mining Conference (2009)
Kass, G.: An exploratory technique for investigating large quantities of categorical data. Appl. Stat. – J. Roy. St. C 29(2), 119–127 (1980)
Radcliffe, N., Surry, P.: Real-World Uplift Modelling with Significance-Based Uplift Trees. Portrait Technical Report, TR-2011-1 (2011)
Rzepakowski, P., Jaroszewicz, S.: Decision trees for uplift modeling with single and multiple treatments. Knowl. Inf. Syst. (2011), doi: 10.1007/s10115-011-0434-0
Breiman, L.: Bagging predictors. Mach. Learn. 26, 123–140 (1996)
Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R., Friedman, J.: The elements of statistical learning, 2nd edn. Springer, New York (2009)
Breiman, L.: Random forests. Mach. Learn. 45, 5–32 (2001)
Segal, M.: Machine learning benchmarks and random forest regression, Technical report, eScholarship Repository, University of California (2004), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/35x3v9t4
Stauss, B., Schmidt, M., Schoeler, A.: Customer frustration in loyalty programs. Int. J. Serv. Ind. Manag. 16(3), 229–252 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Guelman, L., Guillén, M., Pérez-Marín, A.M. (2012). Random Forests for Uplift Modeling: An Insurance Customer Retention Case. In: Engemann, K.J., Gil-Lafuente, A.M., Merigó, J.M. (eds) Modeling and Simulation in Engineering, Economics and Management. MS 2012. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 115. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30433-0_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30433-0_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-30432-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-30433-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)