Customer attrition, also known as customer churn, customer turnover, or customer defection, is the loss of clients or customers. Banks, telephone service companies, Internet service providers, pay TV companies, insurance firms, and alarm monitoring services, often use customer attrition analysis and customer attrition rates as one of their key business metrics (along with cash flow, EBITDA, etc.) because the cost of retaining an existing customer is far less than acquiring a new one. Companies from these sectors often have customer service branches which attempt to win back defecting clients, because recovered long-term customers can be worth much more to a company than newly recruited clients. Churn prediction is one of the most popular Big Data use cases in business. It consists of detecting customers who are likely to cancel a subscription to a service.

NEWS ANALYSIS: The use of machine learning to identify suspicious online activity is a new and important capability in securing the network, but privileged users were the weak point until now.

Just consider the analogy of landlines vs. mobile phones. Our cell phones free us from the limiting wired technology we used for over one hundred years, which connected us to the earth -- but tethered us to it, as well. In the same way wireless phones freed us from that wired tether, self-flying transportation could free us from the massive limitation of cars and highways. It would require no roads, signs or signals. You could travel in a three dimensional fashion, with massively more opportunities to avoid accidents.

Sentiment analysis is a useful service for just about any business. It is always valuable to know whether your customers are saying positive or negative things about you. This gives you more flexibility to start with their sample and then tweak it to your needs. Then you would deploy it yourself and call it yourself.

The benefits of machine learning continue to trickle down to smartphones and gadgets, and chipmaker Qualcomm wants to help speed up the process. The company is launching a new software development kit for its "machine intelligence platform" Zeroth. This SDK will make it easier for companies to run deep learning programs directly on devices like smartphones and drones -- if they're powered by one of Qualcomm's chips, of course. Right now, you're probably using all sorts of deep learning programs you don't know about. Companies like Google and Facebook use this sort of software for things like image and voice recognition, but usually, this process happens in the cloud, with the results beamed to your phone.

SoftBank Group Corp. CEO and Chairman Masayoshi Son said Wednesday he will continue to lead the telecom giant for five to 10 more years, saying there are things he still wants to do. The remarks come a day after SoftBank abruptly announced the company's group president, Nikesh Arora, whom Son had chosen as his successor two years earlier, would be stepping down from the post after Wednesday's annual shareholders meeting. "I was planning to invite SoftBank executives and my friends to my 60th birthday party and just when we would make a toast, I wanted to announce that I would pass the torch on to Nikesh from the next day," Son, 58, said during the meeting in Tokyo. Arora wanted to take the helm in a few years but, "I've made a commitment to lead the company at least five more years or maybe 10 more years," said Son, adding he feels "deeply sorry" about changing his plans and causing trouble for Arora. For his part, Arora told shareholders, "This is a decision I respect and even support because he is too young in his heart and his mind to not continue to lead this great company."

Rejecting unwanted suitors over text is an awkward challenge for a generation of online daters. Ghostbot will detect incoming texts from the person you've chosen to "ghost" – a modern (and cowardly) dating trend that involves ceasing all communication with an unwanted suitor – and send automated responses, lacking in warmth of enthusiasm, until the other person takes the hint. For example, if the other person pushes for a date, Ghostbot might reply: "Nope," "I just have no time right now," or "Sorry, just me and [pizza emoji] tonight." This continues until the pestering messages peter out. "We hear a lot of anecdotes about terrible texting from dating matches, but sometimes blocking someone creates an awkward social circumstance. Ghostbot helps you go through the motion of ghosting someone without negative consequences," said Will Carter, co-founder of Ad Hoc Labs, which makes Ghostbot.

If you are a member of the dating public, you have likely ended your romance with someone--or been slowly snubbed--by a drawn-out, awkward string of text messages and silence. For the uninitiated, this practice of smothering a personal relationship to death by withdrawing from communication is known as ghosting, and there's now a pretty mean chatbot who will do this for you. Users can access the bot through Burner, an app that specializes in providing people with temporary or secondary phone numbers that are used by consumers ranging from online daters who want privacy to charter boat captains who want to separate their personal and business lives on their cell. The company collaborated with screenwriter Peter Miriani and bot-makers Voxable to launch the feature. Though the bot will usually wait anywhere from several minutes to several hours before responding with a ghosting text, for testing purposes the bot was set to go back-and-forth in real time.

I heard you mention a way to stop robocalls on your national radio show. I was unable to write it down at the time. I am so tired of these calls! A. The service I spoke of is called Nomorobo. It lets the phone ring once, and then it identifies the caller. If the caller is a robot telemarketer, it automatically hangs up for you.

Machine learning is a hot topic, but what applications is the technology driving and what drives machine learning? The short answer, concludes a new research report on machine learning, is data--lots of data. "Data is available in volumes never dreamed of, which means the algorithms have more to get their teeth into," concluded a survey by market watcher 451 Research, noting that "machine learning lives or dies depending on the quantity and quality of the data available." Moreover, the rise of application containers in software development "means small [machine language] applications can be placed into software without breaking the rest of the application," the report's authors continue. With enterprises large and small going digital and computing resources ubiquitous, there's plenty of data available with which to train rather than simply program machines.