Joint Cutoff Probabilistic Estimation Using Simulation: A Mailing Campaign Application

Frequently, organisations have to face complex situations where decision making is difficult. In these scenarios, several related decisions must be made at a time, which are also bounded by constraints (e.g. inventory/stock limitations, costs, limited resources, time, schedules, etc). In this paper, we present a new method to make a good global decision when we have such a complex environment with several local interwoven data mining models. In these situations, the best local cutoff for each model is not usually the best cutoff in global terms. We use simulation with Petri nets to obtain better cutoffs for the data mining models. We apply our approach to a frequent problem in customer relationship management (CRM), more specifically, a direct-marketing campaign design where several alternative products have to be offered to the same house list of customers and with usual inventory limitations. We experimentally compare two different methods to obtain the cutoff for the models (one based on merging the prospective customer lists and using the local cutoffs, and the other based on simulation), illustrating that methods which use simulation to adjust model cutoff obtain better results than a more classical analytical method.