how-it-works.md

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How does this model work?

There two stages during the model training phase:

• Phase 1: Feature engineering. In this phase, features are generated using the provided activity data. For this phase, only the data before the provided time_boundary is used. The data after the time_boundary is used to infer the prediction target (labels).
• Phase 2: Machine learning model training. In this phase, the computed features and the inferred labels are used to train a classifier model (using boosted trees).

Phase 1: Feature engineering

For Phase 1, this toolkit performs a series of extremely rich set of feature transformations based on:

• aggregate statistics (over various periods of time) of the raw input feature columns.
• patterns over various period of time (e.g. rate of change of aggregate usage).
• user metadata (using the user_data parameter),

The following table provides a description of all the engineered features used in the model (T is a parameter that can be controlled using the parameter lookback_periods). Hence, these features are computed for each value of T in lookback_periods.

Engineered features
Average number of events in the last T days
Average value of a feature in the last T days
Largest daily value of a feature in the last T days
Largest time interval between two events in the last T days
Number of days since the first event in the last T days
Number of days since the most recent event in the last T days
Number of days to the most recent event in the last T days
Number of days with an event in the last T days
Number of days with an event in the last T days
Number of events in the last T days
Smallest daily value in the last T days
Smallest time interval between two events in the last T days
Sum of a column in the last T days
T day trend in the number of events
Time interval between the first two events in the last T days
Time interval between the two most recent events in the last T days

Phase 2: Model trianing

For Phase 2, a classifier model is trained using gradient boosted trees. Note that a churn prediction model can be trained without any labelled data. All the target labels required for training the boosted tree model are inferred based on the activity data from the past. For example, a dataset that contains data from January 2011 to December 2011 contains historical information about whether or or a user churned during each of the months prior to November 2011.

For a given time_boundary (say October 2011), all the events in observation_data after October 2011 are not (and must never be) included in the training data for the model. In order to create more training data for the boosted tree classifier, multiple time-boundaries can be used (using the parameter time_boundaries).