How would you predict who will renew their subscription next month? What data would you need to solve this? What analysis would you do? Would you build predictive models? If so, which algorithms?

  • Let’s assume that we’re trying to predict renewal rate for Netflix subscription. So our problem statement is to predict which users will renew their subscription plan for the next month.
  • Next, we must understand the data that is needed to solve this problem. In this case, we need to check the number of hours the channel is active for each household, the number of adults in the household, number of kids, which channels are streamed the most, how much time is spent on each channel, how much has the watch rate varied from last month, etc. Such data is needed to predict whether or not a person will continue the subscription for the upcoming month.
  • After collecting this data, it is important that you find patterns and correlations. For example, we know that if a household has kids, then they are more likely to subscribe. Similarly, by studying the watch rate of the previous month, you can predict whether a person is still interested in a subscription. Such trends must be studied.
  • The next step is analysis. For this kind of problem statement, you must use a classification algorithm that classifies customers into 2 groups:
  • Customers who are likely to subscribe next month
  • Customers who are not likely to subscribe next month
  • Would you build predictive models? Yes, in order to achieve this you must build a predictive model that classifies the customers into 2 classes like mentioned above.
  • Which algorithms to choose? You can choose classification algorithms such as Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, etc.
  • Once you’ve opted the right algorithm, you must perform model evaluation to calculate the efficiency of the algorithm. This is followed by deployment.