A data-driven approach to predict the success of bank telemarketing

We propose a data mining (DM) approach to predict the success of telemarketing calls for selling bank long-term deposits. A Portuguese retail bank was addressed, with data collected from 2008 to 2013, thus including the effects of the recent financial crisis. We analyzed a large set of 150 features related with bank client, product and social-economic attributes. A semi-automatic feature selection was explored in the modeling phase, performed with the data prior to July 2012 and that allowed to select a reduced set of 22 features. We also compared four DM models: logistic regression, decision trees (DTs), neural network (NN) and support vector machine. Using two metrics, area of the receiver operating…