Improving telemarketing intelligence through significant proportion of target instances

In this paper we propose, develop, and test a new single-feature evaluator called Significant Proportion of Target Instances (SPTI) to handle the direct-marketing data with the class imbalance problem. The SPTI feature evaluator demonstrates its stability and outstanding performance through empirical experiments in which the real- orld customer data of an e-recruitment firm are used. This research demonstrates that the feature selection using SPTI successfully improves the classifier’s performance in terms of two practical performance metrics. Additionally, we show that it outperforms other well-known feature selection methods and state-of-the-art remedies to the class-imbalance problem. Practically, the findings, when used with the classification model, will help telemarketers to better understand their customers.