We address an important issue in knowledge discovery using neural networks that has been left out in a recent article "Knowledge discovery using a neural network simultaneous optimization algorithm on a real world classification problem" by Sexton et al. [R.S. Sexton, S. McMurtrey, D.J....

The field of direct marketing is constantly searching for new data mining techniques in order to analyze the increasing available amount of data. Self-organizing maps (SOM) have been widely applied and discussed in the literature, since they give the possibility to reduce the complexity of a...

As a consequence of the heightened competition on the education market, the management of educational institutions often attempts to collect information on what drives student satisfaction by e.g. organizing large scale surveys amongst the student population. Until now, this source of...

Customer churn prediction models aim to indicate the customers with the highest propensity to attrite, allowing to improve the efficiency of customer retention campaigns and to reduce the costs associated with churn. Although cost reduction is their prime objective, churn prediction models are...

This paper presents a new approach for consumer credit scoring, by tailoring a profit-based classification performance measure to credit risk modeling. This performance measure takes into account the expected profits and losses of credit granting and thereby better aligns the model developers’...

We derive the proper form of the Akaike information criterion for variable selection for mixture cure models, which are often fit via the expectation–maximization algorithm. Separate covariate sets may be used in the mixture components. The selection criteria are applicable to survival models...