Enhancing Telemarketing Success Using Ensemble-Based Online Machine Learning

Telemarketing is a well-established marketing approach to offering products and services to prospective customers. The effectiveness of such an approach, however, is highly dependent on the selection of the appropriate consumer base, as reaching uninterested customers will induce annoyance and consu...

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Main Authors: Shahriar Kaisar, Md Mamunur Rashid, Abdullahi Chowdhury, Sakib Shahriar Shafin, Joarder Kamruzzaman, Abebe Diro
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Tsinghua University Press 2024-06-01
Series:Big Data Mining and Analytics
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Online Access:https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/BDMA.2023.9020041
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author Shahriar Kaisar
Md Mamunur Rashid
Abdullahi Chowdhury
Sakib Shahriar Shafin
Joarder Kamruzzaman
Abebe Diro
author_facet Shahriar Kaisar
Md Mamunur Rashid
Abdullahi Chowdhury
Sakib Shahriar Shafin
Joarder Kamruzzaman
Abebe Diro
author_sort Shahriar Kaisar
collection DOAJ
description Telemarketing is a well-established marketing approach to offering products and services to prospective customers. The effectiveness of such an approach, however, is highly dependent on the selection of the appropriate consumer base, as reaching uninterested customers will induce annoyance and consume costly enterprise resources in vain while missing interested ones. The introduction of business intelligence and machine learning models can positively influence the decision-making process by predicting the potential customer base, and the existing literature in this direction shows promising results. However, the selection of influential features and the construction of effective learning models for improved performance remain a challenge. Furthermore, from the modelling perspective, the class imbalance nature of the training data, where samples with unsuccessful outcomes highly outnumber successful ones, further compounds the problem by creating biased and inaccurate models. Additionally, customer preferences are likely to change over time due to various reasons, and/or a fresh group of customers may be targeted for a new product or service, necessitating model retraining which is not addressed at all in existing works. A major challenge in model retraining is maintaining a balance between stability (retaining older knowledge) and plasticity (being receptive to new information). To address the above issues, this paper proposes an ensemble machine learning model with feature selection and oversampling techniques to identify potential customers more accurately. A novel online learning method is proposed for model retraining when new samples are available over time. This newly introduced method equips the proposed approach to deal with dynamic data, leading to improved readiness of the proposed model for practical adoption, and is a highly useful addition to the literature. Extensive experiments with real-world data show that the proposed approach achieves excellent results in all cases (e.g., 98.6% accuracy in classifying customers) and outperforms recent competing models in the literature by a considerable margin of 3% on a widely used dataset.
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spelling doaj-art-85dabc4d7cd24431b95e150729408df12025-02-02T22:18:05ZengTsinghua University PressBig Data Mining and Analytics2096-06542024-06-017229431410.26599/BDMA.2023.9020041Enhancing Telemarketing Success Using Ensemble-Based Online Machine LearningShahriar Kaisar0Md Mamunur Rashid1Abdullahi Chowdhury2Sakib Shahriar Shafin3Joarder Kamruzzaman4Abebe Diro5Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics, RMIT University, Melbourne 3000, AustraliaSchool of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton 4700, AustraliaFaculty of Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Science, University of Adelaide, Adelaide 5005, AustraliaCentre for Smart Analytics, Federation University Australia, Ballarat 3350, AustraliaCentre for Smart Analytics, Federation University Australia, Ballarat 3350, AustraliaSchool of Accounting, Information Systems and Supply Chain, RMIT University, Melbourne 3000, AustraliaTelemarketing is a well-established marketing approach to offering products and services to prospective customers. The effectiveness of such an approach, however, is highly dependent on the selection of the appropriate consumer base, as reaching uninterested customers will induce annoyance and consume costly enterprise resources in vain while missing interested ones. The introduction of business intelligence and machine learning models can positively influence the decision-making process by predicting the potential customer base, and the existing literature in this direction shows promising results. However, the selection of influential features and the construction of effective learning models for improved performance remain a challenge. Furthermore, from the modelling perspective, the class imbalance nature of the training data, where samples with unsuccessful outcomes highly outnumber successful ones, further compounds the problem by creating biased and inaccurate models. Additionally, customer preferences are likely to change over time due to various reasons, and/or a fresh group of customers may be targeted for a new product or service, necessitating model retraining which is not addressed at all in existing works. A major challenge in model retraining is maintaining a balance between stability (retaining older knowledge) and plasticity (being receptive to new information). To address the above issues, this paper proposes an ensemble machine learning model with feature selection and oversampling techniques to identify potential customers more accurately. A novel online learning method is proposed for model retraining when new samples are available over time. This newly introduced method equips the proposed approach to deal with dynamic data, leading to improved readiness of the proposed model for practical adoption, and is a highly useful addition to the literature. Extensive experiments with real-world data show that the proposed approach achieves excellent results in all cases (e.g., 98.6% accuracy in classifying customers) and outperforms recent competing models in the literature by a considerable margin of 3% on a widely used dataset.https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/BDMA.2023.9020041telemarketingmachine learningimbalanced datasetoversamplingensemble modelonline learning
spellingShingle Shahriar Kaisar
Md Mamunur Rashid
Abdullahi Chowdhury
Sakib Shahriar Shafin
Joarder Kamruzzaman
Abebe Diro
Enhancing Telemarketing Success Using Ensemble-Based Online Machine Learning
Big Data Mining and Analytics
telemarketing
machine learning
imbalanced dataset
oversampling
ensemble model
online learning
title Enhancing Telemarketing Success Using Ensemble-Based Online Machine Learning
title_full Enhancing Telemarketing Success Using Ensemble-Based Online Machine Learning
title_fullStr Enhancing Telemarketing Success Using Ensemble-Based Online Machine Learning
title_full_unstemmed Enhancing Telemarketing Success Using Ensemble-Based Online Machine Learning
title_short Enhancing Telemarketing Success Using Ensemble-Based Online Machine Learning
title_sort enhancing telemarketing success using ensemble based online machine learning
topic telemarketing
machine learning
imbalanced dataset
oversampling
ensemble model
online learning
url https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/BDMA.2023.9020041
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AT abdullahichowdhury enhancingtelemarketingsuccessusingensemblebasedonlinemachinelearning
AT sakibshahriarshafin enhancingtelemarketingsuccessusingensemblebasedonlinemachinelearning
AT joarderkamruzzaman enhancingtelemarketingsuccessusingensemblebasedonlinemachinelearning
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