arXiv research

Reducing user attrition, i.e. churn, is a broad challenge faced by several industries. In mobile social games, decreasing churn is decisive to increase player retention and rise revenues. Churn prediction models allow to understand player loyalty and to anticipate when they will stop playing a game. Thanks to these pre…

As video games attract more and more players, the major challenge for game studios is to retain them. We present a deep behavioral analysis of churn (game abandonment) and what we called "purchase churn" (the transition from paying to non-paying user). A series of churning behavior profiles are identified, which allows…

Study uses time series analysis to predict player churn and conversion in games.

The emergence of mobile games has caused a paradigm shift in the video-game industry. Game developers now have at their disposal a plethora of information on their players, and thus can take advantage of reliable models that can accurately predict player behavior and scale to huge datasets. Churn prediction, a challeng…

The in-game economies of massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) are complex systems that have to be carefully designed and managed. This paper presents the results of an analysis of auction house data from the MMOG Glitch, across a 14 month time period, the entire lifetime of the game. The data comprise almost 3 m…

Classifiers can be trained with data-dependent constraints to satisfy fairness goals, reduce churn, achieve a targeted false positive rate, or other policy goals. We study the generalization performance for such constrained optimization problems, in terms of how well the constraints are satisfied at evaluation time, gi…

Data-driven approaches which aim to identify and predict player engagement are becoming increasingly popular in games industry contexts. This is due to the growing practice of tracking and storing large volumes of in-game telemetries coupled with a desire to tailor the gaming experience to the end-user's needs. These a…

The classification of time series data is a challenge common to all data-driven fields. However, there is no agreement about which are the most efficient techniques to group unlabeled time-ordered data. This is because a successful classification of time series patterns depends on the goal and the domain of interest, i…

Paper shows distillation can maintain low model churn.

We present a general framework for solving a large class of learning problems with non-linear functions of classification rates. This includes problems where one wishes to optimize a non-decomposable performance metric such as the F-measure or G-mean, and constrained training problems where the classifier needs to sati…

Maximizing product use is a central goal of many businesses, which makes retention and monetization two central analytics metrics in games. Player retention may refer to various duration variables quantifying product use: total playtime or session playtime are popular research targets, and active playtime is well-suite…

As mobile devices become more and more popular, mobile gaming has emerged as a promising market with billion-dollar revenues. A variety of mobile game platforms and services have been developed around the world. A critical challenge for these platforms and services is to understand the churn behavior in mobile games, w…

User churn is an important issue in online services that threatens the health and profitability of services. Most of the previous works on churn prediction convert the problem into a binary classification task where the users are labeled as churned and non-churned. More recently, some works have tried to convert the us…

Customer temporal behavioral data was represented as images in order to perform churn prediction by leveraging deep learning architectures prominent in image classification. Supervised learning was performed on labeled data of over 6 million customers using deep convolutional neural networks, which achieved an AUC of 0…

New model analyzes customer churn with tensor completion and binary data.

Study on rapid policy changes in reinforcement learning.

We show that many machine learning goals, such as improved fairness metrics, can be expressed as constraints on the model's predictions, which we call rate constraints. We study the problem of training non-convex models subject to these rate constraints (or any non-convex and non-differentiable constraints). In the non…

Customer churn is a major problem and one of the most important concerns for large companies. Due to the direct effect on the revenues of the companies, especially in the telecom field, companies are seeking to develop means to predict potential customer to churn. Therefore, finding factors that increase customer churn…

Accurately predicting customer churn using large scale time-series data is a common problem facing many business domains. The creation of model features across various time windows for training and testing can be particularly challenging due to temporal issues common to time-series data. In this paper, we will explore …

As companies increase their efforts in retaining customers, being able to predict accurately ahead of time, whether a customer will churn in the foreseeable future is an extremely powerful tool for any marketing team. The paper describes in depth the application of Deep Learning in the problem of churn prediction. Usin…

Customer retention campaigns increasingly rely on predictive models to detect potential churners in a vast customer base. From the perspective of machine learning, the task of predicting customer churn can be presented as a binary classification problem. Using data on historic behavior, classification algorithms are bu…

Deep learning predicts customer churn in retail.

New method predicts customer churn using mixed-penalty logistic regression.

Study compares classification techniques to predict customer churn in banking.

Bayesian model reduces TV watching data to 11 parameters for churn prediction.

Method detects critical events in complex systems by learning latent causal structure.

Machine learning competitions such as those organized by Kaggle or KDD represent a useful benchmark for data science research. In this work, we present our winning solution to the Game Data Mining competition hosted at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2017). The contest consisted of…

Proposes a greedy algorithm for telecom offers to retain subscribers.

Mobile gaming has emerged as a promising market with billion-dollar revenues. A variety of mobile game platforms and services have been developed around the world. One critical challenge for these platforms and services is to understand user churn behavior in mobile games. Accurate churn prediction will benefit many st…

A churn prediction system guides telecom service providers to reduce revenue loss. However, the development of a churn prediction system for a telecom industry is a challenging task, mainly due to the large size of the data, high dimensional features, and imbalanced distribution of the data. In this paper, we present a…

We have created a framework for analyzing subscription based businesses in terms of a unified metric which we call SCV (single customer value). The major advance in this paper is to model customer churn as an exponential decay variable, which directly follows from experimental data relating to subscription based busine…

Quantum machine learning boosts financial forecasting accuracy.

Off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms for prediction such as regularized logistic regression cannot exploit the information of time-varying features without previously using an aggregation procedure of such sequential data. However, recurrent neural networks provide an alternative approach by which time-varying fea…

ALICE combines feature selection and inter-rater agreeability for ML model insights.

We study stochastic multi-armed bandits with many players. The players do not know the number of players, cannot communicate with each other and if multiple players select a common arm they collide and none of them receive any reward. We consider the static scenario, where the number of players remains fixed, and the d…

We consider a symmetric multi-players zero-sum game with two strategic variables. There are $n$ players, $n\geq 3$. Each player is denoted by $i$. Two strategic variables are $t_i$ and $s_i$, $i\in \{1, \dots, n\}$. They are related by invertible functions. Using the minimax theorem by \cite{sion} we will show that Nas…

A multi-player bandit system resists adversarial attacks with near-optimal regret.

We consider two-player non-zero-sum stopping games in discrete time. Unlike Dynkin games, in our games the payoff of each player is revealed after both players stop. Moreover, each player can adjust her own stopping strategy according to the other player's action. In the first part of the paper, we consider the game wh…

We consider a fully decentralized multi-player stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where the players cannot communicate with each other and can observe only their own actions and rewards. The environment may appear differently to different players, $\textit{i.e.}$, the reward distributions for a given arm are heterog…

New algorithms for n-player games using a player-centered approach.

We develop a machine learning approach to represent and analyze the underlying spatial structure that governs shot selection among professional basketball players in the NBA. Typically, NBA players are discussed and compared in an heuristic, imprecise manner that relies on unmeasured intuitions about player behavior. T…

PolicySynth improves synthetic data alignment with real data for better campaign decisions.

This paper illustrates the similarities between the problems of customer churn and employee turnover. An example of employee turnover prediction model leveraging classical machine learning techniques is developed. Model outputs are then discussed to design \& test employee retention policies. This type of retention dis…

New algorithm tackles multi-player bandit problems with limited access to arms.

Paper presents Transfer Portal model for accurate player performance predictions.

A new algorithm RESYNC for defenders against malicious attackers in multi-player bandits.

Study predicts soccer player market values using machine learning and SHAP for interpretability.

Algorithm optimizes multi-player learning with noisy rewards without direct communication.