Other posts in this series: Bank Marketing - Part 1 - Making the call - An Exploratory Data Analysis In Part 1, we explored the Bank Marketing dataset: 41,188 calls in which a Portuguese bank asked its clients to open a term deposit. Only about 1 in 9 clients said yes.
In this post, we build models that predict whether a client will subscribe. A model is a formula that a computer learns from examples. A classification model does not just answer yes or no: it gives each client a probability of saying yes. A bank can use these probabilities to call the most promising clients first.
Other posts in this series: Bank Marketing - Part 2 - Who will say yes? - Building Classification Models A Portuguese bank ran a series of telemarketing campaigns between May 2008 and November 2010. Its staff called clients and asked them to open a term deposit, a savings account that pays a fixed interest rate for a fixed period. The Bank Marketing dataset (Moro, Cortez and Rita, 2014) records 41,188 of these calls: who the client was, how and when they were called, the state of the economy at the time, and whether the client said yes.