A reference model for customer-centric data mining with support vector machines

Supervised classification is an important part of corporate data mining to support decision making in customer-centric planning tasks. The paper proposes a hierarchical reference model for support vector machine based classification within this discipline. The approach balances the conflicting goals of transparent yet accurate models and compares favourably to alternative classifiers in a large-scale empirical evaluation in real-world customer relationship management applications. Recent advances in support vector machine oriented research are incorporated to approach feature, instance and model selection in a unified framework.