The Hidden Costs of 99% Accuracy: A Trustworthiness Audit of the Telco Customer Churn Benchmark

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.00118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Customer churn prediction on the IBM Telco Customer Churn benchmark (n = 7,043) routinely reports test accuracies above 95%, with the most cited published study reporting 99.01%. We audit this benchmark for four trustworthiness failures invisible to the accuracy- and F1-centred reporting that dominates the literature. First, pre-split SMOTE inflates churn-class F1 by 13.1 percentage points across ten classifiers and fifteen seeds (Wilcoxon p 0.95 p