A deep learning model based on bidirectional temporal convolutional network (Bi-TCN) for predicting employee attrition

Employee attrition, which causes a significant loss for an organization, is the term used to describe the natural decline in the number of employees in an organization as a result of numerous unavoidable events. If a company can predict the likelihood of an employee leaving, it can take proactive steps to address the issue. In this study, we introduce a deep learning framework based on a Bidirectional Temporal Convolutional Network (Bi-TCN) to predict employee attrition. We conduct extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets, including IBM and Kaggle, comparing our model’s performance against classical machine learning, deep learning models, and state-of-the-art approaches across multiple evaluation metrics. The proposed model yields promising results in predicting employee attrition, achieving accuracy rates of 89.65% on the IBM dataset and 97.83% on the Kaggle dataset. We also apply a fully connected GAN-based data augmentation technique and three oversampling methods to augment and balance the IBM dataset. The results show that our proposed model, combined with the GAN-based approach, improves accuracy to 92.17%. We also applied the SHAP method to identify the key features that most significantly influence employee attrition. These findings demonstrate the efficacy of our model, showcasing its potential for use in various industries and organizations.