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611 – Applications in Business and Markets

Customer Classification Using XGBoost: Accurate and Scalable Prediction of Customer Cluster Membership

at ACT Market Research Solutions

High dimensional data analysis for predictive model development is both challenging and valuable. Various predictive models, e.g. CART, Random Forest analysis, bagging, neural networks, support vector machines, etc., have been shown to provide useful information, under various circumstances, for out-of-sample prediction. An alternative approach, known as stochastic gradient boosting (see Friedman 2000), has demonstrated remarkable results and is therefore often the preferred choice for predictive modeling. All afore mentioned methods however can be rendered ineffective when working with very large or high dimensional data. In other words, these methods tend to not ``scale' well and in addition ``over fit' when applied to data sets with many variables. In this paper we will employ ``XGBoost'(eXtreme Gradient Boosting), developed by Tianqi Chen and Carlos Guestrin of the University of Washington, for categorical response prediction. XGBoost provides a regularized, scalable and flexible, i.e. customizable and tunable, implementation of gradient boosting. This presentation will begin with a brief intuitive overview of ensemble-based boosting, culminating in its latest incarnation, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). This paper illustrates the ease of XGBoost‘s implementation in R through its application to the prediction of customer segment membership. In order to insure XGBoost provides comparatively superior predictive performance, it is highly advisable to ``tune' the model through appropriate parameter value selection. This paper therefore also outlines optimal parameter selection for the XGBoost model using the R ``caret' package.