Predicting early user churn in a public digital weight loss intervention


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Date

2024-05

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric

Data

Abstract

Digital health interventions (DHIs) offer promising solutions to the rising global challenges of noncommunicable diseases by promoting behavior change, improving health outcomes, and reducing healthcare costs. However, high churn rates are a concern with DHIs, with many users disengaging before achieving desired outcomes. Churn prediction can help DHI providers identify and retain at-risk users, enhancing the efficacy of DHIs. We analyzed churn prediction models for a weight loss app using various machine learning algorithms on data from 1,283 users and 310,845 event logs. The best-performing model, a random forest model that only used daily login counts, achieved an F1 score of 0.87 on day 7 and identified an average of 93% of churned users during the week-long trial. Notably, higher-dimensional models performed better at low false positive rate thresholds. Our findings suggest that user churn can be forecasted using engagement data, aiding in timely personalized strategies and better health results.

Publication status

published

Book title

CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

994

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Event

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Machine learning; Churn; Dropout; Attrition; mHealth; Digital health

Organisational unit

03681 - Fleisch, Elgar / Fleisch, Elgar check_circle
02120 - Dep. Management, Technologie und Ökon. / Dep. of Management, Technology, and Ec.
03995 - von Wangenheim, Florian / von Wangenheim, Florian

Notes

Funding

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