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arXiv · 2607.00473

How Early Is Early Enough? Design-Dependent Observation-Window Sufficiency in Subscription Churn Prediction

Xiao Han·Yao Xiao·Chenyu Wu·Tongchen Zhang
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Abstract

How many days of early behavior suffice for subscription churn prediction? In the public KKBox dataset, the early indicator of churn is typically an indicator of someone's contract status; however, when looking in the heavily churned manual-renewal segment, having access to early behavior creates a substantial increase in prediction for that specific segment (PR +0.10 at 120 days). A nine-window sufficiency curve shows diminishing returns; descriptive inflection detectors place a knee between 30 and 120 days depending on the metric and model class. Stress-testing over three cohort/task designs shows that this curve is singular to the design being tested; for example, in our test with a moving target, the curve inverts and can shift depending on the feature set used. Therefore, any window-sufficiency claim should state its cohort construction, target definition, and feature families. A survival-filtered replication on educational-attrition data (OULAD) confirms the rising-curve shape in one behavior-dominated setting (floor ROC 0.56 vs. 0.88), though signal composition inverts.

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Xiao Han, Yao Xiao, Chenyu Wu, Tongchen Zhang. 2026-09-21. How Early Is Early Enough? Design-Dependent Observation-Window Sufficiency in Subscription Churn Prediction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00473

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