A two-step system for direct bank telemarketing outcome classification

A two-step system is presented to improve prediction of telemarketing outcomes and to help the marketing management team effectively manage customer relationships in the banking industry. In the first step, several neural networks are trained with different categories of information to make initial predictions. In the second step, all initial predictions are combined by a single neural network to make a final prediction. Particle swarm optimization is employed to optimize the initial weights of each neural network in the ensemble system. Empirical results indicate that the two-step system presented performs better than all its individual components. In addition, the two-step system outperforms a baseline one where all categories of marketing information are used to train a single neural network. As a neural networks ensemble model, the proposed two-step system is robust to noisy and nonlinear data, easy to interpret, suitable for large and heterogeneous marketing databases, fast and easy to implement.