Usage Space Sampling for Fringe Customer Identification

With large numbers of available customers, it is often essential to select representative samples for reasons of computational cost reduction and upstream advanced data analytics. However, for many analytical procedures, the usage behavior observed from a smaller sample of customers must indicate well the fringe of usage and its relation to extreme product loads. Due to the high complexity of technical or service systems, it remains challenging to minimize the number of samples while sufficiently capturing the fringe customers. With the availability of data related to usage behavior, we consider a sampling method to address this problem by analyzing the customer usage space before sampling, then separately sampling fringe and core customers, and weighting the samples afterwards. Experimental results show that the method can identify fringe customers with significantly fewer, yet reproducible samples, while maintaining the distribution representativeness of customer population to a large extend