Revolutionizing Direct Mail: SVMs Outperform Traditional Algorithms for Targeted Marketing
The study compared different methods to predict who would respond to a life insurance mailing using direct mail data. They tested support vector machines (SVMs), logistic regression, and data mining algorithms. Results showed that SVMs performed slightly better than logistic regression, which performed better than the data mining tool. SVMs were found to be useful for handling unbalanced and noisy data, and for ranking observations based on likelihood.