Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Churn Prediction in Mobile Social Games: Towards a Complete Assessment
  Using Survival Ensembles   Reducing user attrition, i.e. churn, is a broad challenge faced by several
industries. In mobile social games, decreasing churn is decisive to increase
player retention and rise revenues. Churn prediction models allow to understand
player loyalty and to anticipate when they will stop playing a game. Thanks to
these predictions, several initiatives can be taken to retain those players who
are more likely to churn.
  Survival analysis focuses on predicting the time of occurrence of a certain
event, churn in our case. Classical methods, like regressions, could be applied
only when all players have left the game. The challenge arises for datasets
with incomplete churning information for all players, as most of them still
connect to the game. This is called a censored data problem and is in the
nature of churn. Censoring is commonly dealt with survival analysis techniques,
but due to the inflexibility of the survival statistical algorithms, the
accuracy achieved is often poor. In contrast, novel ensemble learning
techniques, increasingly popular in a variety of scientific fields, provide
high-class prediction results.
  In this work, we develop, for the first time in the social games domain, a
survival ensemble model which provides a comprehensive analysis together with
an accurate prediction of churn. For each player, we predict the probability of
churning as function of time, which permits to distinguish various levels of
loyalty profiles. Additionally, we assess the risk factors that explain the
predicted player survival times. Our results show that churn prediction by
survival ensembles significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of
traditional analyses, like Cox regression.

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The categories of this paper are: funct-an
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The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
1
The categories of this paper are: cs
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The categories of this paper are: q-fin
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The categories of this paper are: adap-org
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The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
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The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
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The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
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The categories of this paper are: econ
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The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
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The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
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The categories of this paper are: supr-con
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The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
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The categories of this paper are: q-bio
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The categories of this paper are: dg-ga