An Empirical Study on Customer Churn Behaviours Prediction Using Arabic Twitter Mining Approach

With the rising growth of the telecommunication industry, the customer churn problem has grown in significance as well. One of the most critical challenges in the data and voice telecommunication service industry is retaining customers, thus reducing customer churn by increasing customer satisfaction. Telecom companies have depended on historical customer data to measure customer churn. However, historical data does not reveal current customer satisfaction or future likeliness to switch between telecom companies. The related research reveals that many studies have focused on developing churner prediction models based on historical data. These models face delay issues and lack timelines for targeting customers in real-time. In addition, these models lack the ability to tap into Arabic language social media for real-time analysis. As a result, the design of a customer churn model based on real-time analytics is needed. Therefore, this study offers a new approach to using social media mining to predict customer churn in the telecommunication field. This represents the first work using Arabic Twitter mining to predict churn in Saudi Telecom companies. The newly proposed method proved its efficiency based on various standard metrics and based on a comparison with the ground-truth actual outcomes provided by a telecom company.

Mining Twitter to Detect Hotspots in Psychology

For identifying psychological hotspot topics, a mere focus on bibliometric data suffers from a publication delay. To overcome this issue, we introduce Twitter mining of ongoing online communication among scientists for the detection of psychological research topics. Specifically, we collected the entire 69,963 tweets posted between August 2007 and July 2020 from 139 accounts of psychology professors, departments, and research institutes from the German-speaking countries, as well as sections of the German Psychological Society (DGPs). To examine whether Twitter topics are hotspots in terms of indicating future publication trends, 346,361 references in the PSYNDEX database were extracted. For determining the additional value of our approach in contrast to traditional conference analysis, we gathered all available conference programs of the DGPs and its sections since 2010 and compared dates of topic emergence. Results revealed 21 topics addressing societal issues (e.g., COVID-19), methodology (e.g., machine learning), scientific research (e.g., replication crisis), and different areas of psychological research. Ten topics indicated an increasing publication trend, particularly topics related to methodology or scientific transparency. Seven Twitter topics emerged earlier on Twitter than at conferences. A total of four topics could be expected neither by bibliometric forecasting nor conference contents: “methodological issues in meta-analyses”, “playfulness”, “preregistration”, and “mobile brain/body imaging”. Taken together, Twitter mining is a worthwhile endeavor for identifying psychological hotspot topics, especially regarding societal issues, novel research methods, and research transparency in psychology. In order to get the most comprehensive picture of research hotspots, Twitter mining is recommended in addition to bibliometric analyses of publication trends and monitoring of conference topics.