Churn Prediction In Non-Contractual Retail: Comparing Traditional Machine Learning Models and Unified Multi-Task Time Series Model

Increased competition and the growing similarity of products and services offered by retailers have lowered the barriers for customers to switch to competitors. Accurate churn prediction can be a valuable tool for driving effective personalized marketing campaigns and helping to reduce customer attrition. This study evaluates the performance of traditional machine learning techniques, namely, Random Forests, XGBoost, and Support Vector Machines (SVM), and compares them with the Unified Multi-Task Time Series Model (UniTS) for churn prediction, a binary time-series classification task. Despite the strong capacity of UniTS to model complex temporal dynamics and inter-variable relationships, our results indicate that for churn prediction, conventional methods can still outperform it in terms of predictive performance, data efficiency, and computational resource requirements for training and deployment. These findings are consistent across multiple datasets and various churn labeling techniques