Churn Prediction for High-Value Players in Freemium Mobile Games: Using Random Under-Sampling

Guan-Yuan Wang

Statistika, 102(4): 443-453
https://doi.org/10.54694/stat.2022.18

Abstract
Many game development companies use game data analysis for mining insights about users' behaviour and possible product growth. One of the most important analysis tasks for game development is user churn prediction. Effective churn prediction can help hold users in the game by initiating additional actions for their engagement. We focused on high-value user churn prediction as it is of particular interest for any business to keep paying customers satisfied and engaged. We consider the churn prediction problem as a classification problem and conduct the random undersampling approach to address imbalanced class distribution between churners and active users. Based on our real-life data from a freemium casual mobile game, although the best model was chosen as the final classification algorithm for extracted data, we can definitely say there is no general solution to the stated problem. Model performance highly depends on the churn definition, user segmentation and feature engineering, it is therefore necessary to havea custom approach to churn analysis in each specific case.

Keywords
Churn prediction, mobile games, classification models, resamlpling methods, imbalanced class distribution, machine learning