Enhancing the lift under budget constraints: an application in the mutual fund industry

A lift curve, with the true positive rate on the y-axis and the customer pull (or contact) rate on the x-axis, is often used to depict the model performance in many data mining applications, especially in the area of customer relationship management (CRM). Typically, these applications concern only the model accuracy at a relatively small pull or contact/intervention rate of the whole customer base, which is predetermined by a budget constraint for the project, e.g., how many customers can be contacted every month. In this paper, we address the important problem of enhancing the lift (true positive rate) at a specified pull rate. We propose two distinct algorithms, which are applicable to different scenarios. In particular, when the binary class label of the training set is extracted from a continuous variable, we can optimize a training objective which takes into account the specified pull rate rather than the class prior, based on the often ignored continuous variable. In those c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Lian Yan, Michael Fassino, Patrick Baldasare
• Keywords: Data Mining, KDD 2005