Analyzing Key Factors Influencing Employee Resignation Through Decision Tree Modeling and Class Balancing Techniques
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47738/ijiis.v8i2.259Keywords:
Employee Resignation, Decision Tree, SMOTE, HR Analytics, Feature Importance, Predictive ModelingAbstract
Employee resignation poses a significant challenge to organizational stability and workforce planning. This study aims to analyze the key factors influencing employee resignation by developing an interpretable predictive model using the Decision Tree algorithm. The analysis is conducted on the IBM HR Analytics dataset, which includes 1,470 employee records with diverse demographic, behavioral, and job-related attributes. To address the issue of class imbalance—where resignation cases are underrepresented—the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) is applied to enhance model sensitivity and balance. After a comprehensive data preprocessing phase, including feature selection and label encoding, the Decision Tree model is trained with a limited depth to reduce overfitting and maintain interpretability. The model achieves an accuracy of 77%, with a recall of 0.80 and an F1-score of 0.77 for the resignation class. Feature importance analysis identifies stock option level, job satisfaction, monthly income, relationship satisfaction, and job involvement as the most influential predictors. These findings provide actionable insights for human resource practitioners seeking to implement targeted and data-driven employee retention strategies. The study highlights the practical value of interpretable machine learning models in human capital analytics.References
M. Lazzari, J. M. Alvarez, and S. Ruggieri, “Predicting and explaining employee turnover intention,” Int J Data Sci Anal, vol. 14, pp. 233–250, 2022, doi: 10.1007/s41060-022-00329-w.
K. Adeusi, P. Amajuoyi, and L. Benjami, “Utilizing machine learning to predict employee turnover in high-stress sectors,” International Journal of Management & Entrepreneurship Research, vol. 6, no. 5, pp. 1702–1732, 2024, doi: 10.51594/ijmer.v6i5.1143.
M. Gazi, M. Nasiruddin, S. Dutta, R. Sikder, C. Huda, and M. Islam, “Employee attrition prediction in the USA: A machine learning approach for HR analytics and talent retention strategies,” Journal of Business and Management Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 47–59, 2024, doi: 10.32996/jbms.2024.6.3.6.
L. Liu, S. Akkineni, P. Story, and C. Davis, “Using HR Analytics to Support Managerial Decisions,” in Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Southeast Conference, 2020, pp. 168–175. doi: 10.1145/3374135.3385281.
P. K. Jain, M. Jain, and R. Pamula, “Explaining and predicting employees’ attrition: a machine learning approach,” SN Appl Sci, vol. 2, no. 4, 2020, doi: 10.1007/s42452-020-2519-4.
Q. Yin, “Comparison of machine learning models for employee turnover prediction,” Applied and Computational Engineering, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 228–232, 2023, doi: 10.54254/2755-2721/8/20230147.
P. Subhasht, “IBM HR Analytics Employee Attrition & Performance Dataset,” 2025, Kaggle.
A. O. Balogun et al., “SMOTE-Based Homogeneous Ensemble Methods for Software Defect Prediction,” in Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2020, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020, pp. 615–631. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58817-5_45.
A. Raza, M. M. Jawaid, and K. Ahmad, “Predicting Employee Attrition Using Machine Learning Approaches,” Applied Sciences, vol. 12, no. 13, p. 6424, 2022, doi: 10.3390/app12136424.
M. Pradana, I. Pinastawa, N. Maulana, and W. Prastowo, “Performance analysis of tree-based algorithms in predicting employee attrition,” CCIT Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 220–232, 2023, doi: 10.33050/ccit.v16i2.2580.
D. Chung, J. Yun, J. Lee, and Y. Jeon, “Predictive model of employee attrition based on stacking ensemble,” Expert Syst Appl, vol. 204, p. 117540, 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2022.119364.
M. Prathilothamai, Sudarshana, S. Maheswari, A. Chandravadhana, and M. Goutham, “Efficient Approach to Employee Attrition Prediction by Handling Class Imbalance,” in Advances in Computing and Data Sciences, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022, pp. 263–277. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-12641-3_22.
C. Zhang and W. Han, “Ensembles of decision trees and gradient-based learning for employee turnover rate prediction,” PeerJ Comput Sci, vol. 10, p. e2387, 2024, doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.2387.
A. Qutub, A. Al-Mehmadi, M. Al-Hssan, and R. Aljohni, “Prediction of Employee Attrition Using Machine Learning and Ensemble Methods,” Int J Mach Learn Comput, vol. 11, 2021, doi: 10.18178/ijmlc.2021.11.2.1022.
W. Li, “A transformer-based deep learning framework to predict employee attrition,” PeerJ Comput Sci, vol. 9, p. e1570, 2023, doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1570.
J. Park, Y. Feng, and S. Jeong, “Developing an advanced prediction model for new employee turnover intention utilizing machine learning techniques,” Sci Rep, vol. 14, no. 1, 2024, doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-50593-4.
A. Chaudhary, A. Rizvi, N. Kumar, and A. Mishra, “A novel approach for customer churn prediction in telecom using machine learning models,” 2023, Unpublished. doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3177792/v1.
S. Satheeshkumar, S. K. Rout, and B. K. Sethi, “Predicting employee attrition using machine learning: Logistic regression and random forest on IBM dataset,” in Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol. 436, Springer, 2025. doi: 10.1007/978-981-96-2124-8_24.
A. Fern’andez, S. Garc’a, M. Galar, R. C. Prati, B. Krawczyk, and F. Herrera, Learning from Imbalanced Data Sets. Springer, 2018. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-98074-4.
M. Althobaiti, R. Alotaibi, and A. Alzahrani, “Machine learning-based employee attrition prediction using synthetic oversampling and ensemble methods,” Electronics (Basel), vol. 11, no. 3, p. 471, 2022, doi: 10.3390/electronics11030471.
K. Mohiuddin, M. A. Alam, and J. Lehmann, “Retention is all you need: Explainable AI for employee attrition,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.03103, 2023, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2304.03103.
S. H"oppner, E. Stripling, B. Baesens, and T. Verdonck, “Profit driven decision trees for churn prediction,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.08101, 2017, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.1712.08101.
F. Guerranti and G. M. Dimitri, “A comparison of machine learning approaches for predicting employee attrition,” Applied Sciences, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 267, 2023, doi: 10.3390/app13010267.
N. S. Mansor, N. S. Sani, and M. Aliff, “Machine learning for predicting employee attrition,” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, vol. 12, no. 11, 2021, doi: 10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0121149.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with IJIIS : International Journal on Informatics and Information Systems agree to the following terms: Authors retain copyright and grant the IJIIS : International Journal on Informatics and Information Systems right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-SA 4.0) that allows others to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the work for any purpose, even commercially with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in IJIIS : International Journal on Informatics and Information Systems. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in IJIIS : International Journal on Informatics and Information Systems. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

