The Hidden Costs of 99% Accuracy: A Trustworthiness Audit of the Telco Customer Churn Benchmark
Customer churn prediction on the IBM Telco Customer Churn benchmark (n = 7,043) routinely reports test accuracies above 95%, with the most cited published study reporting 99.01%. We audit this benchmark for four trustworthiness failures invisible to the accuracy- and F1-centred reporting that dominates the literature. First, pre-split SMOTE inflates churn-class F1 by 13.1 percentage points across ten classifiers and fifteen seeds (Wilcoxon p < 10^-4 per classifier); the same leaky pipeline ordering paired with class weighting yields no inflation, isolating the effect to SMOTE's geometric construction. We measure the mechanism directly: approximately 36% of synthetic training points are ne...
| Authors | Soumyadeep Roy |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 9 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 September 2026 |
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