CTGAN-ENN: a tabular GAN-based hybrid sampling method for imbalanced and overlapped data in customer churn prediction

Abstract

Class imbalance is one of many problems of customer churn datasets. One of the common problems is class overlap, where the data have a similar instance between classes. The prediction task of customer churn becomes more challenging when there is class overlap in the data training. In this research, we suggested a hybrid method based on tabular GANs, called CTGAN-ENN, to address class overlap and imbalanced data in datasets of customers that churn. We used five different customer churn datasets from an open platform. CTGAN is a tabular GAN-based oversampling to address class imbalance but has a class overlap problem. We combined CTGAN with the ENN under-sampling technique to overcome the class overlap. CTGAN-ENN reduced the number of class overlaps by each feature in all datasets. We investigated how effective CTGAN-ENN is in each machine learning technique. Based on our experiments, CTGAN-ENN achieved satisfactory results in KNN, GBM, XGB and LGB machine learning performance for customer churn predictions. We compared CTGAN-ENN with common over-sampling and hybrid sampling methods, and CTGAN-ENN achieved outperform results compared with other sampling methods and algorithm-level methods with cost-sensitive learning in several machine learning algorithms. We provide a time consumption algorithm between CTGAN and CTGAN-ENN. CTGAN-ENN achieved less time consumption than CTGAN. Our research work provides a new framework to handle customer churn prediction problems with several types of imbalanced datasets and can be useful in real-world data from customer churn prediction.