The Prediction of Purchase Amount of Customers Using Support Vector Regression with Separated Learning Method

Data mining has empowered the managers who are charge of the tasks in their company to present personalized and differentiated marketing programs to their customers with the rapid growth of information technology. Most studies on customer' response have focused on predicting whether they would respond or not for their marketing promotion as marketing managers have been eager to identify who would respond to their marketing promotion. So many studies utilizing data mining have tried to resolve the binary decision problems such as bankruptcy prediction, network intrusion detection, and fraud detection in credit card usages. The prediction of customer's response has been studied with similar methods mentioned above because the prediction of customer's response is a kind of dichotomous decision problem. In addition, a number of competitive data mining techniques such as neural networks, SVM(support vector machine), decision trees, logit, and genetic algorithms have been applied to the prediction of customer's response for marketing promotion. The marketing managers also have tried to classify their customers with quantitative measures such as recency, frequency, and monetary acquired from their transaction database. The measures mean that their customers came to purchase in recent or old days, how frequent in a period, and how much they spent once. Using segmented customers we proposed an approach that could enable to differentiate customers in the same rating among the segmented customers. Our approach employed support vector regression to forecast the purchase amount of customers for each customer rating. Our study used the sample that included 41,924 customers extracted from DMEF04 Data Set, who purchased at least once in the last two years. We classified customers from first rating to fifth rating based on the purchase amount after giving a marketing promotion. Here, we divided customers into first rating who has a large amount of purchase and fifth rating who are non-respondents for the promotion. Our proposed model forecasted the purchase amount of the customers in the same rating and the marketing managers could make a differentiated and personalized marketing program for each customer even though they were belong to the same rating. In addition, we proposed more efficient learning method by separating the learning samples. We employed two learning methods to compare the performance of proposed learning method with general learning method for SVRs. LMW (Learning Method using Whole data for purchasing customers) is a general learning method for forecasting the purchase amount of customers. And we proposed a method, LMS (Learning Method using Separated data for classification purchasing customers), that makes four different SVR models for each class of customers. To evaluate the performance of models, we calculated MAE (Mean Absolute Error) and MAPE (Mean Absolute Percent Error) for each model to predict the purchase amount of customers. In LMW, the overall performance was 0.670 MAPE and the best performance showed 0.327 MAPE. Generally, the performances of the proposed LMS model were analyzed as more superior compared to the performance of the LMW model. In LMS, we found that the best performance was 0.275 MAPE. The performance of LMS was higher than LMW in each class of customers. After comparing the performance of our proposed method LMS to LMW, our proposed model had more significant performance for forecasting the purchase amount of customers in each class. In addition, our approach will be useful for marketing managers when they need to customers for their promotion. Even if customers were belonging to same class, marketing managers could offer customers a differentiated and personalized marketing promotion.

Support Vector Regression에서 분리학습을 이용한 고객의 구매액 예측모형

본 연구에서는 기업의 마케팅 프로모션에 따른 반응고객의 구매액 예측을 위한 방법을 제시하고 SVR의 효과적인 학습방법을 제시하였다. 프로모션에 의한 고객의 구매액을 기반으로 고객을 5등급으로 등급화하고 각 등급 내에서 SVR을 적용하여 고객의 구매액을 예측하였다. 본 연구에서 제안하는 예측된 고객의 등급 내에서 고객 구매액을 예측하는 분리데이터 학습법이 프로모션에 반응한 모든 고객을 대상으로 구매액을 예측하는 전체데이터 학습법보다 높은 예측성과를 보여주었다. 일반적으로 세분화된 고객집단을 하나의 집단으로 보고 동일한 마케팅 전략을 제시하나 본 연구를 통해 구매액에 따라 등급화 된 고객의 등급 내에서 다시 고객의 거래 구매액을 예측하여 동일한 집단 내에서도 차별화된 마케팅 전략을 제시할 수 있는 기반을 제시하였다. 즉 동일한 등급에서도 고객 구매액에 따라 고객의 우선순위를 정할 수 있으며, 이는 마케팅 담당자가 프로모션을 제시할 고객을 선정할 때 유용한 정보로 활용될 수 있다.