Predicting and Explaining Customer Churn for an Audio/e-book Subscription Service using Statistical Analysis and Machine Learning

Sammanfattning: The current technology shift has contributed to increased consumption of media and entertainment through various mobile devices, and especially through subscription based services. Storytel is a company offering a subscription based streaming service for audio and e-books, and has grown rapidly in the last couple of years. However, when operating in a competitive market, it is of great importance to understand the behavior and demands of the customer base. It has been shown that it is more profitable to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones, which is why a large focus should be directed towards preventing customers from leaving the service, that is preventing customer churn. One way to cope with this problem is by applying statistical analysis and machine learning in order to identify patterns and customer behavior in data. In this thesis, the models logistic regression and random forest are used with an aim to both predict and explain churn in early stages of a customer's subscription. The models are tested together with the feature selection methods Elastic Net, RFE and PCA, as well as with the oversampling method SMOTE. One main finding is that the best predictive model is obtained by using random forest together with RFE, producing a prediction score of 0.2427 and a recall score of 0.7699. The other main finding is that the explanatory model is given by logistic regression together with Elastic Net, where significant regression coefficient estimates can be used to explain patterns associated with churn and give useful findings from a business perspective.