A divide-and-conquer strategy using feature relevance and expert knowledge for enhancing a data mining approach to bank telemarketing

The discovery of knowledge through data mining provides a valuable asset for addressing decision making problems. Although a list of features may characterize a problem, it is often the case that a subset of those features may influence more a certain group of events constituting a sub-problem withi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Moro, Sergio (author)
Other Authors: Cortez, Paulo (author), Rita, Paulo (author)
Format: article
Language:eng
Published: 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1822/62767
Country:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt:1822/62767
Description
Summary:The discovery of knowledge through data mining provides a valuable asset for addressing decision making problems. Although a list of features may characterize a problem, it is often the case that a subset of those features may influence more a certain group of events constituting a sub-problem within the original problem. We propose a divide-and-conquer strategy for data mining using both the data-based sensitivity analysis for extracting feature relevance and expert evaluation for splitting the problem of characterizing telemarketing contacts to sell bank deposits. As a result, the call direction (inbound/outbound) was considered the most suitable candidate feature. The inbound telemarketing sub-problem re-evaluation led to a large increase in targeting performance, confirming the benefits of such approach and considering the importance of telemarketing for business, in particular in bank marketing.