A Study on the Employee Turnover Prediction using XGBoost and SHAP

XGBoost와 SHAP 기법을 활용한 근로자 이직 예측에 관한 연구

Purpose In order for companies to continue to grow, they should properly manage human resources, which are the core of corporate competitiveness. Employee turnover means the loss of talent in the workforce. When an employee voluntarily leaves his or her company, it will lose hiring and training cost and lead to the withdrawal of key personnel and new costs to train a new employee. From an employee's viewpoint, moving to another company is also risky because it can be time consuming and costly. Therefore, in order to reduce the social and economic costs caused by employee turnover, it is necessary to accurately predict employee turnover intention, identify the factors affecting employee turnover, and manage them appropriately in the company. Design/methodology/approach Prior studies have mainly used logistic regression and decision trees, which have explanatory power but poor predictive accuracy. In order to develop a more accurate prediction model, XGBoost is proposed as the classification technique. Then, to compensate for the lack of explainability, SHAP, one of the XAI techniques, is applied. As a result, the prediction accuracy of the proposed model is improved compared to the conventional methods such as LOGIT and Decision Trees. By applying SHAP to the proposed model, the factors affecting the overall employee turnover intention as well as a specific sample's turnover intention are identified. Findings Experimental results show that the prediction accuracy of XGBoost is superior to that of logistic regression and decision trees. Using SHAP, we find that jobseeking, annuity, eng_test, comm_temp, seti_dev, seti_money, equl_ablt, and sati_safe significantly affect overall employee turnover intention. In addition, it is confirmed that the factors affecting an individual's turnover intention are more diverse. Our research findings imply that companies should adopt a personalized approach for each employee in order to effectively prevent his or her turnover.