Customer Relationship Management in Telecom Market using an Optimized Case-based Reasoning

Most previous studies on improving the effectiveness of CBR have focused on the similarity function aspect or optimization of case features and their weights. However, according to some of the prior research, finding the optimal k parameter for the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) is also crucial for improving the performance of the CBR system. Nonetheless, there have been few attempts to optimize the number of neighbors, especially using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. In this study, we introduce a genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize the number of neighbors that combine, as well as the weight of each feature. The new model is applied to the real-world case of a major telecommunication company in Korea in order to build the prediction model for the customer profitability level. Experimental results show that our GA-optimized CBR approach outperforms other AI techniques for this mulriclass classification problem.