Date of Award

12-2020

Degree Name

MS in Industrial Engineering

Department/Program

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

College

College of Engineering

Advisor

Tali Freed

Advisor Department

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Advisor College

College of Engineering

Abstract

Churn prediction is a common data mining problem that many companies face across industries. More commonly, customer churn has been studied extensively within the telecommunications industry where there is low customer retention due to high market competition. Similar to customer churn, employee churn is very costly to a company and by not deploying proper risk mitigation strategies, profits cannot be maximized, and valuable employees may leave the company. The cost to replace an employee is exponentially higher than finding a replacement, so it is in any company’s best interest to prioritize employee retention.

This research combines machine learning techniques with undersampling in hopes of identifying employees at risk of churn so retention strategies can be implemented before it is too late. Four different classification algorithms are tested on a variety of undersampled datasets in order to find the most effective undersampling and classification method for predicting employee churn. Statistical analysis is conducted on the appropriate evaluation metrics to find the most significant methods.

The results of this study can be used by the company to target individuals at risk of churn so that risk mitigation strategies can be effective in retaining the valuable employees. Methods and results can be tested and applied across different industries and companies.

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