In our churn example, a customer would be an entity of interest, and each customer might be described by a large number of attributes, such as usage, customer service history, and many other factors. Which of these actually gives us information on the customer’s likelihood of leaving the company when her contract expires? How much information? Sometimes this process is referred to roughly as finding variables that “correlate” with churn (we will discuss this notion precisely). A business analyst may be able to hypothesize some and test them, and there are tools to help facilitate this
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