Applying SNA Techniques to Telecom Subscriber Calling Data

Veena B. Mendiratta
Bell Labs, Network Performance and Reliability Department at Alcatel-Lucent, Naperville, Illinois

Date: April 27, 2012

Time: 11am – 12pm
Place: ITEB 336
Talk Title: Applying SNA Techniques to Telecom Subscriber Calling Data

Abstract

Subscriber churn in telecommunication networks is a major problem and cost for service providers. Given the large number of subscribers involved – tens of millions – even a small improvement in the churn prediction algorithm can reap huge economic benefits. Typical churn prediction algorithms use calling metrics and demographic and CRM data as variables in supervised machine learning algorithms. Our current work was motivated by an effort to enhance the performance of the existing models by including additional variables in the algorithms based on the results from Social Network Analysis (SNA) of the calling data. A novel algorithm was developed to compute tie strengths between subscribers based on several calling attributes. The tie strengths can be used to compute the influence of churners on other subscribers. In this talk I will describe the telecom calling and other subscriber data used for churn prediction and show how this data is used in churn prediction algorithms. I will then present the results from SNA of the calling data and discuss potential applications of these results.

Biography

Veena B. Mendiratta leads the next-generation solutions, services and systems reliability work in the Bell Labs Network Performance and Reliability department at Alcatel-Lucent in Naperville, Illinois. She began her career at AT&T Bell Labs over 25 years ago. Her work has focused on the reliability and performance analysis for telecommunications systems products, networks, and services to guide system architecture solutions. Her technical interests include architecture, system and network dependability analysis, software reliability engineering, and telecom analytics. Current work is focused on predictive analytics for customer experience solutions, LTE solution reliability engineering, and service reliability modeling for mission critical networks for various domains. She holds a B.Tech in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India, and a Ph.D. in operations research from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA. Dr. Mendiratta is a senior member of IEEE; a member of INFORMS; a member of the Alcatel-Lucent Technical Academy; and a recipient of the Bell Labs President’s Award.