https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1963-5041
Peer Review History
| Original SubmissionDecember 14, 2023 |
|---|
|
PONE-D-23-42083 CLASSIFICATION OF CUSTOMER RETENTION USING HYBRID SVC-SDNN TO ENHANCE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Ishaq, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we have decided that your manuscript does not meet our criteria for publication and must therefore be rejected. I am sorry that we cannot be more positive on this occasion, but hope that you appreciate the reasons for this decision. Kind regards, Asadullah Shaikh, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments: This paper does not provide a solid method for Accuracy and AUC-ROC of SVC-SDN In addition, the paper structure is not well managed. Also, there is no comparison in the related work section. The references are quite old. The accuracy claim is too high but its not well explained [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] - - - - - For journal use only: PONEDEC3 |
| Revision 1 |
|
-->PONE-D-23-42083R1-->-->CLASSIFICATION OF CUSTOMER RETENTION USING HYBRID SVC-SDNN TO ENHANCE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT-->-->PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Ishaq, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 06 2025 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:-->
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols . Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols . We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Sajid Anwar, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 2. We suggest you thoroughly copyedit your manuscript for language usage, spelling, and grammar. If you do not know anyone who can help you do this, you may wish to consider employing a professional scientific editing service. Whilst you may use any professional scientific editing service of your choice, PLOS has partnered with both American Journal Experts (AJE) and Editage to provide discounted services to PLOS authors. Both organizations have experience helping authors meet PLOS guidelines and can provide language editing, translation, manuscript formatting, and figure formatting to ensure your manuscript meets our submission guidelines. To take advantage of our partnership with AJE, visit the AJE website (http://learn.aje.com/plos/) for a 15% discount off AJE services. To take advantage of our partnership with Editage, visit the Editage website (www.editage.com) and enter referral code PLOSEDIT for a 15% discount off Editage services. If the PLOS editorial team finds any language issues in text that either AJE or Editage has edited, the service provider will re-edit the text for free. Upon resubmission, please provide the following: ● The name of the colleague or the details of the professional service that edited your manuscript ● A copy of your manuscript showing your changes by either highlighting them or using track changes (uploaded as a supporting information file) ● A clean copy of the edited manuscript (uploaded as the new manuscript file) 3. When completing the data availability statement of the submission form, you indicated that you will make your data available on acceptance. We strongly recommend all authors decide on a data sharing plan before acceptance, as the process can be lengthy and hold up publication timelines. Please note that, though access restrictions are acceptable now, your entire data will need to be made freely accessible if your manuscript is accepted for publication. This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If you are unable to adhere to our open data policy, please kindly revise your statement to explain your reasoning and we will seek the editor's input on an exemption. Please be assured that, once you have provided your new statement, the assessment of your exemption will not hold up the peer review process. Additional Editor Comments (if provided): [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions -->Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.--> Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: (No Response) ********** -->2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. --> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** -->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? --> Reviewer #1: N/A Reviewer #2: Yes ********** -->4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.--> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** -->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.--> Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ********** -->6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)--> Reviewer #1: The paper presents improved churn detection using novel hybrid deep learning algorithms to predict bank customers’ retention and identify factors that influence better customer retention. SVC-SDNN model was proposed for churn prediction. The proposed model was compared to other existing models with the proposed model having a better performance. The performance of the proposed model is encouraging. However, I have the following observations: 1. The claim in second paragraph under section 1.1 should be cited. 2. Sections 1.2 to 1.5 are not needed in a paper. I think those sections are relevant to project/thesis report. If there is anything important at all in those sections, especially, section 1.5 that talks about the structure of the paper should be married to the introduction as the last paragraph. 3. Figure 1 citation is incomplete, it should be a surname, year. 4. Section II should be renamed as Background of the Study and Related Work because Sections 2.1 and 2.2 fall under background 5. In-text citations in Table 1 do not need initials but only surname(s) and year. In addition, the table should provide a succinct summary of the related work and research gaps and not just a repetition of titles and dataset. 6. Remove any line of codes in the paper. Codes can be added as appendix or supplementary if required. 7. The dataset is skewed as the authors have also notified. There is need to balance the dataset to avoid model over/under-fitting. 8. The authors claimed that relevant features were selected. However, what informed the selection of the relevant features or better still the technique for feature selection was not stated. 9. The hybridization of the SVC and SDNN was not clear in the paper. Authors are to provide the details of hybridization to enable reproducibility. 10. Allow a line spacing before and after a figure/table for readability. 11. I suggest you merge Tables 2 to 11 as one so that one can easily see the difference in performance among the models at a glance. 12. The confusion matrices from Figures 9 to 13 can be arranged together or sequentially (may be 3 in a row) for readability and comparison. 13. The structure of the paper is not good enough. It is advisable to follow the journal template. Reviewer #2: Although, I haven't previously review the paper, However, evaluating the authors response to the reviewers, authors have comprehensively addressed the reviewer comments in the revised version. Still, to improve the quality of the paper, below are certain comments that need to be address 1. The authors should add more technical details about the proposed approach in the abstract, i.e., talking more about about pre processing, feature engineering, or model details. 2. The authors should enlist the key contribution of the proposed approach. 3. The support vector machine and random forest should be moved to the result or methodology section where the proposed approach is elaborated, the related work should only focus on the state-of-the-art literature. 4. Figure 5 seems unnecessary, instead a Table should be added that shows several example from the dateset. 5. There are many deep-learning based approaches published on the topic. What authors motivate to proposed a hybrid approach while not using state-of-the-art transformers or LLMs? Adding a more rationale will further improve the justification of the proposed hybrid approach 5. The authors should further provide details on the implementation of the proposed approach, such as on how SVM is added to the DNN classifier? 7. The author should demonstrate or provide the rationale on how the simple banking system dateset attributes are enough for churn prediction for the generalization of the proposed approach. 8. Also, what motivate the authors for the proposed approach, as there are better alternatives to the proposed approach by employing large language models. 9. In Tables, the the labels 0 and 1 should be replaced with more intuitive one to better understand the results. 10. Summary should be replaced with Discussion and add some insights how the proposed approach help state-of-the-art 11. The authors should add threats to validity section to identify the possible threats in the proposed approach. ********** -->7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy .--> Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes: Javed Ali khan ********** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Pre-flight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org . Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
| Revision 2 |
|
-->PONE-D-23-42083R2-->-->CLASSIFICATION OF CUSTOMER RETENTION USING HYBRID SVC-SDNN TO ENHANCE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT-->-->PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Ishaq, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 10 2025 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to HTTPS://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:-->
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols . Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols . We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Sajid Anwar, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions -->Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.--> Reviewer #2: (No Response) Reviewer #3: (No Response) ********** -->2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. --> Reviewer #2: Partly Reviewer #3: Yes ********** -->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? --> Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #3: Yes ********** -->4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.--> Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: (No Response) ********** -->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copy-edit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.--> Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ********** -->6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)--> Reviewer #2: Although I haven't provided feedback on this manuscript for the second round. However, looking at the feedback and reviews from the previous esteemed reviewers, the authors have partially answered the reviews. For example, The review regarding data balancing needs to be incorporated in the proposed approach. The label 0 and 1 in Tables should be represented with some useful text. The feature selection approach is not elaborated. Beside this there are some additional comments that needs to be incorporated in the manuscript. The author have added some code in the manuscript, it should be replaced with equations and should be numbered. There is no comparison between the existing state_of_the_art approaches In Figure 4, the author show model optimization, however, I couldn't figure-out this in the methodology or in the experiment on how the model are optimized Reviewer #3: There are several areas in the revised manuscript that need further improvement to enhance the clarity, completeness, and presentation of this research. My detailed comments are as follows: - As previously suggested, Table 1 should provide a more informative and structured summary of the related work. The table should ideally include columns for methods used, datasets, results (if necessary), and the research gaps identified in each study. - The provided GitHub link to the notebook (httpS://github.com/ishaqafridi/SVC-SDN-Churn) appears to be invalid, as the repository is not available. The authors should ensure that the correct link is provided and that the repository is publicly accessible. - There are multiple instances of missing or incomplete citations in the manuscript (e.g., the placeholder “[?]” at the end of page 1 and first citation on page 5 in Table 1). - There are inconsistencies in formatting, particularly with missing spaces after full stops and after some tables. - As suggested earlier, Tables 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 present the accuracy and AUC-ROC of different models. These can be consolidated into a single comparative table. - Instead of writing code in Section 3.6, the process should be expressed in an algorithmic form (e.g., pseudo-code or algorithm environment), followed by an explanation in text. This should also help in addressing the comment regarding “how SVM and DNN are used together?”. - The authors need to discuss how the attributes like: age, balance, credit cards and credit score are very important in the precise prediction of churns. - The revised version of the manuscript does not include a conclusion section. - The authors should add a discussion on how alternative deep learning models, such as Transformers or attention-based architectures, might perform in the context of customer churn prediction. If such models are not suitable or have been found to under-perform, relevant studies should be cited to support this position. ********** -->7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy .--> Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #3: No ********** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Pre-flight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org . Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
| Revision 3 |
|
-->PONE-D-23-42083R3-->-->CLASSIFICATION OF CUSTOMER RETENTION USING HYBRID SVC-SDNN TO ENHANCE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT-->-->PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Ishaq, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 10 2025 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to HTTPS://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:-->
-->If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols . Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols . We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Sajid Anwar, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 1. If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise. 2. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions -->Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.--> Reviewer #3: (No Response) Reviewer #4: (No Response) ********** -->2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. --> Reviewer #3: Partly Reviewer #4: (No Response) ********** -->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? --> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: (No Response) ********** -->4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.--> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: (No Response) ********** -->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copy-edit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.--> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: (No Response) ********** -->6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)--> Reviewer #3: The comment from my previous review that says: "The authors should add a discussion on how alternative deep learning models, such as Transformers or attention-based architectures, might perform in the context of customer churn prediction. If such models are not suitable or have been found to under-perform, relevant studies should be cited to support this position." has not been fully addressed. Although the authors have replied to the comment in the reviewer's response document and added it to the manuscript but this discussion needs to be supported by recent and relevant citations. Reviewer #4: Observations on the Manuscript Data Split and Class Balancing Ambiguity The manuscript states that an 80/20 split was used, with SMOTE+Tomek applied only to training data. However, the classification report shows test support counts of 2,000 (1,593 vs. 407), which conflicts with the earlier claim of a 7.2% minority class. This raises concerns about whether class balancing leaked into the test set or if a different split was used. Authors must clarify this discrepancy. Labeling and Interpretation Inconsistency In the SVM results (Table 6), “Churn” has recall = 1.00, support = 1,593, while “Non-Churn” has recall = 0.11, support = 407. Yet the text interprets class 0 as Non-Churn with recall 1.00—the opposite of the table headings. This labeling confusion persists across the manuscript and figures. The authors should ensure consistent class naming and interpretation. Positioning Relative to Standard Methods The paper should more clearly situate its contribution against standard stacked learners and explain why DNN-based features outperform simpler but well-tuned alternatives such as tree-boosting or linear models. Lack of Robust Evaluation Results appear to be based on a single data split. There are no confidence intervals, multiple runs, statistical significance testing, or calibration analysis. This limits the reliability and generalization of the findings. Dropout Rate Clarification The manuscript mentions dropout values (e.g., 0.7, 0.8) but does not clarify whether these denote keep-probabilities or drop-rates. An 0.8 drop-rate is unusually high and requires justification with training curves. Feature Selection within Cross-Validation The authors list selected features but do not specify whether feature selection was performed inside cross-validation folds. Clarification of the pipeline ordering (selection → resampling → training) is required. Kernel Choice in SVM The study employs an RBF kernel but does not compare it against linear or polynomial kernels, nor justify its selection. Such justification or comparative evidence is expected. Hyper-parameter Tuning Transparency The values of C and gamma for SVM were fixed without reporting any search or tuning strategy. The authors should clarify whether a systematic tuning process was performed. ********** -->7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy .--> Reviewer #3: No Reviewer #4: No ********** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Pre-flight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org . Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.--> |
| Revision 4 |
|
-->PONE-D-23-42083R4-->-->CLASSIFICATION OF CUSTOMER RETENTION USING HYBRID SVC-SDNN TO ENHANCE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT-->-->PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Ishaq, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 05 2026 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to HTTPS://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:-->
-->If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols . Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols . We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Sajid Anwar, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the articles retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions -->Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.--> Reviewer #3: (No Response) Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed ********** -->2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. --> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ********** -->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? --> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ********** -->4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.--> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ********** -->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copy-edit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.--> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ********** -->6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)--> Reviewer #3: In response to my earlier recommendation during the previous review phase, the authors have added the following statement to the manuscript: "Although this study focused on traditional and sequential deep learning models, the reviewer rightly points out the potential of alternative deep learning architectures such as Transformers and other attention-based mechanisms. These models have achieved state-of-the-art results in domains with complex, high-dimensional data such as natural language processing (NLP) and vision" While I appreciate that they have addressed the concern raised earlier, the phrasing that refers directly to the reviewer (e.g., “the reviewer rightly points out...”) is not appropriate for inclusion in the main text of a research paper. Typically, such references should be avoided, and the content should be rephrased impersonally. Additionally, I noticed that citations beyond this point appear to be incomplete or incorrectly formatted, with placeholders such as “[?]”. This seems to be a LaTeX formatting issue that should be corrected before final submission. Reviewer #4: Authors have addressed all the previous eight comments, however, I have the following observations to further improve their quality of work and bring clarity in their manuscript. 1. The authors are advised to add a table about the hyper-parameters and their tuning, clearly stating each aspect. 2. Also, the experimentation parameters, including the hardware utilized and software, are not stated by the authors; therefore, it is advised that the authors should clarify them. ********** -->7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy .--> Reviewer #3: No Reviewer #4: No ********** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] To ensure your figures meet our technical requirements, please review our figure guidelines: HTTPS://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/figures You may also use PLOS’s free figure tool, NAAS, to help you prepare publication quality figures: HTTPS://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/figures#loc-tools-for-figure-preparation. NAAS will assess whether your figures meet our technical requirements by comparing each figure against our figure specifications. --> |
| Revision 5 |
|
CLASSIFICATION OF CUSTOMER RETENTION USING HYBRID SVC-SDNN TO ENHANCE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT PONE-D-23-42083R5 Dear Dr. Ishaq, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. For questions related to billing, please contact billing support . If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact one-press@plos.org. Kind regards, Sajid Anwar, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS One Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions -->Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.--> Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed ********** -->2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. --> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ********** -->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? --> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ********** -->4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.--> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ********** -->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copy-edit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.--> Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ********** -->6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)--> Reviewer #3: (No Response) Reviewer #4: (No Response) ********** -->7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy .--> Reviewer #3: No Reviewer #4: No ********** |
| Formally Accepted |
|
PONE-D-23-42083R5 PLOS One Dear Dr. Ishaq, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS One. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset You will receive further instructions from the production team, including instructions on how to review your proof when it is ready. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few days to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, if your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact one-press@plos.org. You will receive an invoice from PLOS for your publication fee after your manuscript has reached the completed accept phase. If you receive an email requesting payment before acceptance or for any other service, this may be a phishing scheme. Learn how to identify phishing emails and protect your accounts at HTTPS://explore.plos.org/phishing. If we can help with anything else, please email us at customer-care@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Sajid Anwar Academic Editor PLOS One |
Open letter on the publication of peer review reports
PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.
We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.
Learn more at ASAPbio .