Postprocessing Decision Trees to Extract Actionable Knowledge

  • Authors:
  • Qiang Yang;Jie Yin;Charles X. Ling;Tielin Chen

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICDM '03 Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Most data mining algorithms and tools stop at discoveredcustomer models, producing distribution informationon customer profiles. Such techniques, when applied to industrialproblems such as customer relationship management(CRM), are useful in pointing out customers who arelikely attritors and customers who are loyal, but they requirehuman experts to postprocess the mined information manually.Most of the postprocessing techniques have been limitedto producing visualization results and interestingnessranking, but they do not directly suggest actions that wouldlead to an increase the objective function such as profit. Inthis paper, we present a novel algorithm that suggest actionsto change customers from an undesired status (suchas attritors) to a desired one (such as loyal) while maximizingobjective function: the expected net profit. We developthese algorithms under resource constraints that areabound in reality. The contribution of the work is in takingthe output from an existing mature technique (decisiontrees, for example), and producing novel, actionable knowledgethrough automatic postprocessing.