Assessing Employee Attrition Using Classifications Algorithms

Abstract

Employees leave an organization when other organizations offer better opportunities than their current organizations. Continuity and sustenance and even completion of jobs are crucial issues for the companies not to suffer financial losses. Especially if the talented employees, who are at critical positions in the companies, leave the job, it becomes difficult for the organizations to maintain their businesses. Today, organizations would like to predict attrition of their employees and plan and prepare for it. However, the HR departments of organizations are not advanced enough to make such predictions in a handcrafted manner. For this reason, organizations are looking for new systems or methods that automatize the prediction of employee attrition utilizing data mining methods. In this study, we use IBM HR data set and apply different classification methods, such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, J48, LogitBoost, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Naive Bayes, Bagging, AdaBoost, Logistic Regression, to predict the employee attrition. Different from exiting studies, we systematically evaluate our findings with various classification metrics, such as F-measure, Area Under Curve, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. We observe that data mining methods can be useful for predicting the employee attrition.