Paper info

Topological data analysis of time series data for B2B customer relationship management

Rodrigo Rivera-Castro, Polina Pilyugina1, Alexander Pletnev, Ivan Maksimov, Wanyi Zhu and Evgeny Burnaev

The paper was published at the 35th IMP-conference in Paris, France in 2019.

Topological data analysis (TDA) is a recent approach to analyse data sets from the perspective of their topological structure. Its use for time series data has been limited to the ?eld of ?nancial time series primarily and as a method for feature generation in machine learning applications. In this work, TDA is presented as a technique to gain additional understanding of the customers’ loyalty for business-to-business customer relationship management. Increasing loyalty and strengthening relationships with key accounts remain an active topic of discussion both for researchers and managers. Using two public and two proprietary data sets of commercial data, this research shows that the technique enables analysts to better understand their customer base and identify prospective opportunities. In addition, the approach can be used as a clustering method to increase the accuracy of a predictive model for loyalty scoring. This work thus seeks to introduce TDA as a viable tool for data analysis to the quantitate marketing practitioner.