Modeling Attrition in Organizations from Email Communication

Abstract

Modeling people's online behavior in relation to their real-world social context is an interesting and important research problem. In this paper, we present our preliminary study of attrition behavior in real-world organizations based on two online datasets: a dataset from a small startup (40+ users) and a dataset from one large US company (3600+ users). The small startup dataset is collected using our privacy-preserving data logging tool, which removes personal identifiable information from content data and extracts only aggregated statistics such as word frequency counts and sentiment features. The privacy-preserving measures have enabled us to recruit participants to support this study. Correlation analysis over the startup dataset has shown that statistically there is often a change point in people's online behavior, and data exhibits weak trends that may be manifestation of real-world attrition. Same findings are also verified in the large company dataset. Furthermore, we have trained a classifier to predict real-world attrition with a moderate accuracy of 60-65% on the large company dataset. Given the incompleteness and noisy nature of data, the accuracy is encouraging.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 08, 2013
Accession Number
ADA619209

Entities

People

  • Akshay Patil
  • Jianqiang Shen
  • Jie Gao
  • John Hanley
  • Juan Liu
  • Oliver Brdiczka

Organizations

  • Xerox

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Attrition
  • Computational Science
  • Computers
  • Correlation Analysis
  • Data Mining
  • Data Sets
  • Electronic Mail
  • Feature Extraction
  • Human Behavior
  • Information Science
  • Machine Learning
  • Network Science
  • Online Communications
  • Social Media
  • Social Networks
  • Social Sciences
  • Supervised Machine Learning

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Computer Vision.
  • Cybersecurity.