Excluded Predictors

Figure 1. Excluded predictors
Excluded predictors

By default, potential predictors are screened for suitability. Those that do not pass the screening tests are excluded from further consideration. In this case:

  • Owns TV (owntv) is excluded because more than 95% of the cases take the same value of this variable. So many people own television sets that it is unlikely to segment the population of customers very well, and would therefore make a poor predictor.
  • Log-wireless last month (lnwiremon) and Log-wireless over tenure (lnwireten) are excluded because more than 70% of their cases are missing. More than 70% of the customers do not have wireless service, so the logarithms of the amounts spent ($0) are system-missing. Statistics for predictor selection are based upon non-missing values, so variables with many missing values may not be representative of the population.

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