Predicting customer behaviour: The University of Melbourne's KDD Cup report

Hugh Miller, Sandy Clarke, Stephen Lane, Andrew Lonie, David Lazaridis, Slave Petrovski and Owen Jones ; JMLR W & CP 7:45-55, 2009.

Abstract

We discuss the challenges of the 2009 KDD Cup along with our ideas and methodologies for modelling the problem. The main stages included aggressive nonparametric feature selection, careful treatment of categorical variables and tuning a gradient boosting machine under Bernoulli loss with trees.