A Semi-Supervised and Inductive Embedding Model for Churn Prediction of Large-Scale Mobile Games

Xi Liu, Muhe Xie, Xidao Wen, Rui Chen, Yong Ge, Nick Duffield, Na Wang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

32 Scopus citations

Abstract

Mobile gaming has emerged as a promising market with billion-dollar revenues. A variety of mobile game platforms and services have been developed around the world. One critical challenge for these platforms and services is to understand user churn behavior in mobile games. Accurate churn prediction will benefit many stakeholders such as game developers, advertisers, and platform operators. In this paper, we present the first large-scale churn prediction solution for mobile games. In view of the common limitations of the state-of-the-art methods built upon traditional machine learning models, we devise a novel semi-supervised and inductive embedding model that jointly learns the prediction function and the embedding function for user-app relationships. We model these two functions by deep neural networks with a unique edge embedding technique that is able to capture both contextual information and relationship dynamics. We also design a novel attributed random walk technique that takes into consideration both topological adjacency and attribute similarities. To evaluate the performance of our solution, we collect real-world data from the Samsung Game Launcher platform that includes tens of thousands of games and hundreds of millions of user-app interactions. The experimental results with this data demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model against existing state-of-the-art methods.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages277-286
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781538691588
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 27 2018
Event18th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM 2018 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: Nov 17 2018Nov 20 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM
Volume2018-November
ISSN (Print)1550-4786

Conference

Conference18th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM 2018
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period11/17/1811/20/18

Keywords

  • Churn prediction
  • Graph embedding
  • Mobile apps
  • Representation learning
  • Semi-supervised learning

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Engineering

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