Telecom Customer Churn Prediction and Taxi Order Prediction: Analysis of Two Classic Data Science Practical Projects

This article introduces two practical cases from the open-source project DS_projects: telecom customer churn prediction (classification problem) and taxi order volume prediction (time series problem). It demonstrates how to use machine learning to solve real business problems and is an excellent resource for learning data science applications. The project is from GitHub, authored by hacxxcode, and published on May 30, 2026.

Original Author and Source

• Original Author/Maintainer: hacxxcode
• Source Platform: GitHub
• Original Project Title: DS_projects
• Original Link: https://github.com/hacxxcode/DS_projects
• Publication Date: May 30, 2026

The value of data science is reflected in solving practical business problems. This project covers two core problem types: classification and time series, helping learners master machine learning applications in business scenarios.

Business Background and Problem Definition

The telecom industry is highly competitive, and customer churn is a core challenge. The goal of churn prediction is to identify high-risk customers (binary classification problem), helping enterprises to retain them targeted and optimize resource allocation.

Data Features and Engineering

• Demographic Features: Age, gender, marital status, etc.
• Account Information: Tenure, contract type (monthly/annual), payment method, etc.
• Service Usage: Subscribed service types, call duration, data usage
• Cost Information: Monthly fee, total cost
• Behavioral Indicators: Number of customer service contacts, complaint records

Contract type is a strong predictor; monthly-payment customers have a higher risk of churn.

Modeling Strategy and Algorithm Selection

• Baseline Model: Logistic Regression (high interpretability)
• Ensemble Methods: Random Forest (robust), XGBoost/LightGBM (high accuracy)
• Others: Support Vector Machine (suitable for high-dimensional data)

Model Evaluation Metrics

For imbalanced data, focus on recall (identifying real churn customers), precision (reducing resource waste), F1 score, AUC-ROC, and lift chart (business value).

Business Insights

• Contract type is the strongest predictor
• New customers have higher churn risk than old customers
• Number of customer service contacts is a risk signal
• Bundled sales can reduce churn risk

These insights guide decisions such as contract design and new customer onboarding.

Business Scenarios and Challenges

Predict order volume in different time periods/regions to optimize driver dispatch, reduce empty driving rate, and implement dynamic pricing. Challenges include time dependence, periodicity (daily/weekly), and trend changes.

Feature Engineering

• Lag Features: Order volume in the past few hours/days
• Sliding Window Statistics: Average, max/min values, standard deviation
• Time Features: Hour, day of the week, whether it's weekend/holiday
• External Data: Weather, special events

Rainy days and large-scale events affect order volume.

Modeling Methods

• Traditional Statistics: ARIMA, Exponential Smoothing, Prophet
• Machine Learning: Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Tree, SVR
• Deep Learning: LSTM, 1D CNN, Transformer

Evaluation Metrics

MAE (Mean Absolute Error), RMSE (Root Mean Square Error), MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error), SMAPE (Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error).

Practical Applications

• Real-time Performance: Simplify models to ensure response speed
• Granularity: Fine-grained prediction (e.g., 15 minutes) is more practical but more difficult
• Spatial Dimension: Regional prediction needs to address data sparsity
• Model Update: Regular retraining to adapt to pattern changes

Common Learning Value

The two projects demonstrate the standard data science process: problem understanding → data exploration → feature engineering → model selection → evaluation and validation → result interpretation.

The project uses the Python ecosystem:

• Data Processing: Pandas, NumPy
• Visualization: Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly
• Machine Learning: Scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM
• Time Series: Statsmodels, Prophet
• Deep Learning: TensorFlow, PyTorch
• Environment: Jupyter Notebook

These tools cover the entire data science workflow.

Suggestions for Learners

1. Understand the Business: Grasp the problem background first; feature engineering requires domain knowledge
2. Emphasize Data Cleaning: Handling missing values and outliers is key to model quality
3. Compare Models: Try multiple algorithms and understand their pros and cons
4. Focus on Interpretability: In business scenarios, explaining "why" is more important than accuracy
5. Iterative Improvement: Start with simple models and gradually increase complexity

Summary

DS_projects covers two core problems: classification and time series, demonstrating the complete data science process. In-depth study can improve practical skills and cultivate data-driven decision-making thinking.

Project Address: https://github.com/hacxxcode/DS_projects