Multiobjective evolutionary feature selection and fuzzy classification of contact centre data

In this work, a data set describing phone interactions arising in a multichannel and multiskill contact centre is considered with the aim of classifying inbound sessions into those that will be eventually managed by an agent and those that, instead, will be abandoned before. More precisely, the goal of the work is to extract interpretable pieces of information that allow us to predict whether a user will or will not abandon a call, which may turn out to be very useful for the purpose of contact centre managing. To this end, the performance of two well‐known, state‐of‐the‐art evolutionary algorithms for feature selection (evolutionary nondominated radial slots based algorithm and nondominated sorted genetic algorithm) is compared for the task of feature selection, under the criteria of accuracy and cardinality of the selection, as well as for the task of fuzzy rule extraction, under the criteria of interpretability, accuracy, and hypervolume test. The best obtained fuzzy classifier, chosen after a decision making process, is validated and interpreted by domain experts.